Why Abused Children Hate Themselves, Not Their Parents

 From "The School of Life":

Why Abused Children End Up Hating Themselves

There is almost nothing sadder in the universe than the
abuse of a child by its own parents. That a being should be put on earth in an
entirely helpless state, then maltreated by those to whom it automatically
turns for protection and education, constitutes a particular abomination.

What I am starting to learn more and more every day is that abuse in the household is more common than I realized. It's really sad, but it seems that family dynamics are more riddled with tragedy that joy. I don't want to accept this fallen aspect of our fallen world, but unfortunately, the stain of sin has ruined everything, including family relationships.

God wants all families to prosper and be in health, but these families need to receive the revealing favor of the Savior!

One of the people who can best help us to understand the way
a child typically responds to abuse is a little known and too often
underestimated Scottish 20th century psychoanalyst, Ronald Fairbairn. Fairbairn
was touchingly honest about what had brought him to psychoanalysis: he was not
well. He had a bad relationship with his mother; he had a cold marriage, he had
a range of anxieties and phobias. But as he put it himself: ‘It is difficult to
see what inducements to seek psycho-analytical treatment there could be for an
adult with a relatively mature, strong and unmodified ego.’ In other words,
only fairly disturbed people are ever likely to get interested in
psychoanalysis, let alone submit themselves to a training. And that is fine –
and no argument against anything.

Ronald Fairbairn

Fairbairn came to his views about how the victims of
parental abuse interpret what has happened to them as a result of working as a
doctor at the University of Edinburgh’s Psychological Clinic for Children in
the late 1930s. In his post, he came into contact with many children who had
been extremely badly treated in their homes of origins. What he found – and
what profoundly struck him – was how little these children appeared to hold the
abuse against their parents. Some had been appallingly mocked, others badly
beaten, others sexually abused. One might have expected that the children
would, in the safety of a doctor’s consulting room, voice grave misgivings and
rage against those who had treated them so unfairly. But Fairbairn found no such
thing. 

Contrary to all expectations, the children he spoke to had only positive
things to report about those who had – to a substantial degree – ruined their
lives. A violent father would be described as strong and decisive: a cold and
contemptuous mother would be re-interpreted as kind and intelligent. And
correspondingly, a child would pour all the negativity that one might have
assumed belonged elsewhere onto their own shoulders: they were the bad one,
they had clearly been naughty, there was something intolerably wrong with them
– and that is why they had been punished.

Children have no one else to look up to besides their parents, when they are children. If they do not have their parents to look up to, whom do they look up to? The identity crisis, the emotional trauma is too great without that sense of core identity. People will tolerate abuse over anxiety every time, and for children that is all the more the case.

What Fairbairn beautifully and poignantly understood was
that the abused child has no option to think of themselves in decent terms. The
truth is quite literally unbearable and must be twisted. One could not continue
to live, as a defenceless child, if one fully took on board the evil that has
been visited upon one. And therefore the mind alters the facts in the name of
psychic survival.

In perhaps his most brilliant, paper, The Repression and the
Return of Bad Objects first published in 1941, Fairbairn tried to show the
reader the perverse but highly understandable logic operating in the abused
child’s mind.

‘If a mature individual loses an object,  however important, he still has some objects
remaining. His eggs are not all in one basket… The infant, on the other hand,
has no choice. He has no alternative but to accept or reject his object – an
alternative which is liable to present itself to him as a choice between life
and death.’

There are no other parents that the child in an abusive
family are able to run to: he has no other mother or father, the neglectful and
harmful people in the vicinity are the only figures he has to cling to. Lose
faith in them and one is done for. No wonder if one opts to reinvent who they
might be.

At this point, Fairbairn is wrong. Everyone of us can run to the perfect loving FATHER! We received sonship before Him through Christ Jesus. AMEN!

Fairbairn famously called this manoeuvre of the mind ‘the
moral defence,’ an attempt to exonerate the abuser and chastise oneself for
one’s own abuse. In the words of one of Fairbairn’s most sensitive later
interpreters, the American therapist and writer David Celani: ‘The moral
defence is a source of comfort, as it reassures the child that he is being
appropriately corrected by loving objects… the illusion that the child is
securely attached to good objects prolongs his hope that his unmet
developmental needs have a chance of being satisfied and that the feeling of
abandonment will be avoided.’

One of the more striking features of Fairbairn was that he
remained throughout his life a religious person, as so few of the great figures
of psychoanalysis have been. Far from a distraction, this theological
background gave Fairbairn a way of conceptualising a child’s response to abuse
in terms of a form of faith. In a memorable aphorism, he wrote: ‘It is better to
be a sinner in a world ruled by God than to live in a world ruled by the
Devil.’ By this Fairbairn meant that the child prefers to think of themselves
as still inhabiting an essentially ethical responsible realm, one in which they
have transgressed and must be punished – but where the authority figures remain
pillars of decency. As he went on to explain: ‘A sinner in a world ruled by God
may be bad; but there is always a certain sense of security to be derived from
the fact that the world around is good… there is always a hope of redemption.’
One shudders at the pain that makes this kind of mental gymnastics necessary.

We have to receive a larger revelation. The world is bad, our parents may have been bad, but God is GOOD! The Lord is GOOD and His mercy endures forever! Every one of us needs to receive this revelation. We need to be transformed from glory to glory by seeing more of Christ Jesus, and the Holy Spirit changes us! Our minds are renewed to the truth that though we were harmed as children, it was not our fault, and our parents were wrong, believed wrong, did wrong, or they chose to do wrong — but none of that makes us wrong.

Fairbairn’s view of what psychoanalysis can do for an abused
child who has fallen for ‘the moral defence’ is contained in one especially gnomic
sentence: ‘The psychotherapist is the true successor to the exorcist,’ he
wrote, because ‘he is concerned, not only with ‘the forgiveness of sins’, but
also with ‘the casting out of devils.’

What did Fairbairn mean? The answer takes us into the heart of
Fairbairn’s innovations in what psychoanalysis calls object relations. For
Fairbairn, the bad external object (the abused parent) is quite literally
internalised by the child and thereby turns the child into a bad object in
their own eyes. All the violence of which they, the child, have been subject
ends up in them and then colours their internal world. How they feel about
themselves becomes a mirror of how others felt about them. Their sense of self,
made up as it is of the introjections of parental messages, becomes a panoply
of darkness and masochism.

Fairbairn proposed – counter to a lot of psychoanalytic
thinking at the time – that the primary instrument by which ‘the devils’ inside
the ill patient’s mind were to be exorcised was through a clinically
much-neglected quality: kindness. By registering the analyst’s unusual kindness
and empathy, the patient might be induced to loosen their hold on the moral
defence and cease to think of their parents as so good, and themselves as so
bad. They might – through love – come to be a little more on their own side and
a little less on the side of their abusers – and thereby save their lives.

I have another word for kindess: GRACE!

Fairbairn described a patient of his called Annabel who had
developed a phobia about driving. Every time she was at the wheel, she became
terrified that she might inadvertently hit someone and leave a trail of corpses
behind; the terror forced her to pull up and walk home. In her sessions with
Fairbairn, Annabel came to see that her phobia was the result of a suppressed rage
against her father, an outwardly respectable and highly successful man, who had
in early childhood behaved incestuously towards her. Consciously, Annabel had
only positive feelings towards her father. Unconsciously, it was far more
complicated. Annabel had come to be frightened of herself at the wheel (and in
other areas too; her self-suspicion was vast) in lieu of properly appreciating
how unfair and depraved her own father had been towards her. Fairbairn noted
that many of his patients were suffering from symptoms essentially caused by
incestuous wishes of their fathers which they had been unable to understand or
address, and that had morphed into self-hatred and paranoia. Fairbairn gives us
a penetrating analysis of paranoia: the entire world will grow filled with
dangers when we cannot repatriate the violence and nastiness of which we have
been unknowing victims.

People hate their parents for the wrong that they did to them, but at the same time, there is this incredible guilt about being angry with one's parents. We need to see the Grace of God filling in all that hurtful places in our lives, setting us free from the wrong believing. 

We need to receive more of the LOVE OF THE FATHER!

We hear a lot about entitled people; people who take more
than their due, who are unfair to the world and deserve to be taken down a peg.
What we hear less about are people whose sufferings stem from an opposite
problem: they lack the courage to fight back against those who do them wrong
and cannot imagine that someone else might be a perpetrator of injustice.
Sometimes, to cast out the devils inside us, we may need some help in spotting
the devils – or, more appropriately, the extremely ill figures – in our own
families. For this, Fairbairn is a supreme guide and mentor.