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Aug. 11, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
55:49
1125 Attacking Parents - A Conference
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Alright, well we might as well get started.
Thanks everyone for the impromptu call.
This is a topic I've been mulling over for about a week.
And I guess I can start with you, Greg, assuming that your internet doesn't keep whacking up.
Okay, sure.
Okay, so when you were a kid, you experienced a lot of parental violence, right?
Yes, I would say so.
Okay, so you had belts, spankings, headings, and so on, right?
Yes. My father stuck mostly with the belt, or bare hand.
On the butt, on the legs, but my mom would, you know, whatever was the closest thing to her fist would get hit.
So, I have a question for you, which I've sort of been mulling over for the past couple of days for myself, been talking about it with Christina.
What... What would have happened if you had resisted?
Oh, I did.
I did resist once I got older.
When I was very small, of course, it was difficult to resist.
You couldn't resist. We tried all sorts of things, running away, hiding behind furniture, things like that, begging, pleading.
Whatever would work.
And in my parents' case, actually, turns out the more you cried and the louder you screamed, the sooner it would end.
So that was the technique that we adopted as little kids.
Resistance at that age...
I mean, physical resistance or running away usually meant worse punishment.
My mom had this habit...
Of grabbing you by your wrist so that you couldn't run away.
And then as she's feeding you, you know, you're trying to run away.
So you get this whole, like, maypole thing going on where you're kind of circling around the living room as she's throttling you.
My dad would just take you into the bathroom and lean you over the tub and pull your pants off.
That way, you know, as you're crying and screaming and whatnot, the bathtub kind of acts as an echo chamber and sort of puts the fear of God into the rest of your brothers.
So that kind of magnifies the effect, I guess.
But when I got older...
It sort of became a contest of resistance where we would actually, with my dad, would actually get into,
to knock down fights with him until the day that he kind of sensed that we had the strength to actually overpower him, and then it stopped altogether.
But with my mom, instead of resistance, it actually became kind of – we would taunt her.
right?
Like, because as we got older, um, She didn't have a lot of physical strength, so her beatings became kind of an inside joke amongst us.
And we would actually taunt her.
Like, I remember this one time where...
She was pounding me on my back and I was sort of giving her instructions like, oh yeah, a little to the left and down a little.
Oh, that's better. Thank you.
Like that. So resistance, of course, was met with more But we did it anyways.
Right, okay.
Now, let's say that you're a seven-year-old kid.
Okay, at seven.
At seven. Now, at seven...
You can do quite a lot to resist, right?
You can fight, you can poke at the eyes, right?
You can grab something and swing, right?
You can pick up a bat, you can pick up a stick, you can pick up whatever, right?
Right.
Where do you think it would have stopped if you had done that?
Like if you if you had given yourself complete permission to to bite, to kick, to gouge, to whatever it took to not submit to the violence, what would have happened?
Hmm.
Well, with my mom, I think it would have been more dangerous than with my dad.
you Okay, so what would have happened?
My mom would have just flown into a rage and clobbered us.
Okay, so she clobbers you and you kick and you gouge and you pull hair and you whatever, right?
What happens? Right.
Well, she would probably either, well, she in fact did a couple times box my ears or punch me in the face or punch me in the stomach until I was out of breath and couldn't resist.
Oh no, you can always, because you can wait until you're in breath, right?
And then you can attack. Yeah.
Right. I'm not saying, of course, like I'm not saying anybody should do this, right?
I'm not saying that at all.
I think it would be a crazy thing to do as a kid, but I'm just trying to figure out in these kinds of situations, where is the limit of If we tried that with my dad, he probably would have...
Well, he had this technique of kind of bear-hugging you to keep you from sort of flailing back or like that when we weren't like...
At the house where we could be sent to the bathroom.
He would bear hug you until you just stopped resisting.
Biting was a total no-no.
Biting would have gotten...
Oh, I... I can't even imagine what my dad would have done if I had bit him for something like that.
Well, what if you'd grabbed a pencil and stuck it into his leg or something?
And again, I'm not suggesting any of this would have been sensible or even sane, but...
I... Well...
There's that...
I don't know.
It would have...
Shit, it probably would have ended with...
It's a tough question, right?
Yeah, yeah.
But I think it's a very important one, and I'll get to why in a bit, and I hope that this is okay with you, but I think it's a very important question to ask.
I think if I had kept it up and not stopped...
I think my dad probably would have locked me in my room and then called...
I don't know, called...
called a doctor or something.
Well, but see, this is part of what I'm trying to get at in terms of resistance.
If he tried to lock you in your room, if he picked you, then you bite, you stab him with something, whatever it takes, right?
Because you're taking it to the point where he's got you locked in a room.
At age seven, he could easily have overpowered me.
I mean, he's a pretty strong guy.
No, sorry, just to be annoying, right?
I mean, again, if you're willing to go all the way as a child in terms of resistance, it's pretty hard to overpower a child unless you're going to knock the child unconscious, right?
If you're willing to bite, to go for the eyes, to pull hair, to whatever, right?
To insert your fingers into a cheek and just rip as hard as you can, it's going to cause some problems for the adults, right?
Like if you turn into just a total Tasmanian devil.
Right, and I know my brother Chris did that a couple times, and at the younger ages, at six, seven years old, It was not difficult for my dad to overpower us.
I mean, literally to restrain us to the point where we couldn't really do anything.
Well, sure. And again, I'm not trying to suggest that you can take on, in any kind of equal way, an adult of that size.
But, I mean, if you're willing to carry a sharp pencil in your pocket, if you're willing to go for the soft and vulnerable spots, if you're willing to Well, like, I remember one point where, um, he, um...
Where he actually had my brother Chris on the ground, bellied down with his arms behind his back and sitting on him so that he literally couldn't do anything.
Right, but then at some point your dad's going to have to get back up, right?
Right, right, right, right.
And at that point, it's kind of a waiting game, right?
I mean, Chris knows that he's not going to be able to really do anything.
And my dad's willing to sit there for hours, so...
Right, okay, but even before your dad gets...
And I'm sorry to be persistent on this, and I know it's an ugly topic, but I think it's important nonetheless.
If your brother were willing to go all the way again to use a knife, to use a pencil, to use his teeth, To gouge, to whatever, right?
It would be a lot tougher to subdue him.
Of course, eventually it would probably occur, right?
But it would be really dangerous, right?
Yeah, it would be extremely dangerous, very hard.
And more than likely, my dad probably would have had...
I know he considered this with Chris, but if I had done that myself, he probably would have had us...
Institutionalized. Okay, so if you had fought, or if you had attempted to use violence in self-defense, you would have been institutionalized?
More than likely.
So you feel that your dad, in a moment of rage and extremity, would have not escalated the violence any further, but would have disengaged and decided to institutionalize you?
Well, he would have tried to find some way to subdue us.
And if he couldn't, then he would have called the cops and had us institutionalized after that.
My mom, on the other hand, had an unbelievably violent temper.
She would have just kept fighting until one of the two of us Ran out of steam.
Well, running out of steam is not what happens when both people are willing to escalate the violence.
Right. What happens when both people are totally committed to escalating the violence?
Well, somebody ends up dead.
Or unconscious or severely injured or something like that, right?
Right. Right. Right, right.
And I'm pretty sure that...
Once we got to a certain age, my mom would have been completely...
You don't have anything uploading, do you?
You're kind of cutting out there. How about now?
A little better. Better?
Okay. Yeah, I can't really control the quality of this connection as I come and go.
So, sorry about that.
It turns to be.
Yeah, my arm-- I'm sorry, just hold off, because I can't hear you at all.
I'll just tell you a little bit about why I'm talking about this or why I'm asking these horrible questions and then we can try picking it up and see if your connection has improved or we can go to somebody else if yours is off.
Sorry, can you just say something again?
Hello, testing? Yeah, that's great.
Sorry, go ahead then. Oh, I'm so sorry.
You've gone again. Okay, so I'll just talk a little bit more, and we'll try picking it up, or we can move on to somebody else.
Sorry until you get your stuff back.
I was reading a journal.
I have become a member of the International Psychohistorical Association, and so I got their magazine, or it's a quarterly periodical,
And if I remember rightly, in it was an article, it certainly came from this group, which was talking about how everyone who was a child, or at least most people who were children, between the ages,
starting a little after two and up to about seven, that the children who are examined by psychologists, psychiatrists, and these are not children in crisis, just average population, They report extreme fear to about seven,
and the older kids who can describe their dreams have myriad and plentiful dreams of being attacked by monsters, of being attacked by witches, of dying, and so on.
And this seems to be a pretty common phenomenon.
This is an Italian female psychologist who first Describe this phenomenon.
It's been reproduced in other studies around the world.
The childhood seems to be a time, particularly early childhood, sort of late toddler to early latency.
A childhood seems to be a time of extreme fear.
A fear of parents.
And the children report that they fear dying and Some of them report that they fear being killed by their parents.
This was kind of shocking to me and Christina and I have been talking about it quite a bit recently.
And there's two ways in which the children appear to be afraid of their parents.
The first is that they're afraid of violence, direct physical violence.
And the second is that they're afraid of abandonment because of course for a child particularly of that age, Abandonment is the same as a death sentence, right?
Genetically, that's sort of how we would be programmed via response to parental abandonment would be the same as murder, right?
It's not like a three-year-old left in the wilderness is gonna do anything other than be, you know, food for jackals.
So this was kind of shocking to me and I thought about a couple of things that we've talked about here at FDR and some things from my own history and Christina talked about some things from her history.
And the first thing that I thought of was I did a podcast probably about 18 months ago, I think, which basically went something like this.
All threats are threats of murder.
In other words, the reason you stay in prison is because you're afraid of being thrown into solitary if you try to escape or being beaten or something like that.
And the reason that you would submit to being beaten is if you resist, they will continue to escalate the beatings until you are dead.
The reason you pay your taxes is because if you attempt to resist the cops coming into your house by pulling a gun on them, they will shoot you until you are dead.
Well, they may attempt to shoot to wound, but that's the risk that you're taking, that all threats are threats of murder.
A woman who's being beaten by her husband does not resist because she's afraid that in his blind rage he will kill her.
The reason that we submit to violence at all is because we're afraid of being murdered.
And so I thought back to the, and I've mentioned this before on podcasts, and again I'm sorry for the grimness of the topic, but I found this actually be quite liberating afterwards.
And I thought about the last time that I resisted, when I think I was about five or so, and my mother had just been completely wretched to me all afternoon, yelling and screaming at me and so on.
I can't remember what it was that happened to cause this issue between us, or to cause her rage or whatever.
But I tried to run away, right?
I packed up some cookies and some bread and put them in a little bag and so on and tried to run away.
I know I was six when I went to boarding school.
This was definitely before then, so I think I was about five.
I don't think I was any younger because the memory is too clear, although of course trauma imprints itself very deeply in the brain.
And my mother, this was very late at night, at least it was to my mind.
I don't know what the actual time was, but it was definitely very late, way past my bedtime.
And I tried to get out, and my mother picked me up.
She heard me, and she kind of came storming down on me.
And she picked me up, and she started pounding my head against the door.
And this was a big, heavy door.
Not like, you know, an apartment cupboard door, but this was a big, thick, heavy door.
And I remember very clearly going limp, you know, like, you know, realizing that there was no way to survive this and just went limp.
Now, I always thought it was kind of like, well, there's no way to survive.
There's no point having any psychological resistance to it.
But I'm thinking about this article in my own history and talking about it with Christina.
I think it's a little different.
I think the reality...
Is that I fear being killed.
And of course, taking a five-year-old child's head and pounding it against a heavy door repeatedly is obviously a parent who's completely out of control.
And that can result in brain damage.
Right? And so...
This feeling of needing to submit to parental coercion because the parent is murderous or that murder is a possibility, more than a possibility. The reason that I went limp, the way that you'd go limp if you were being mauled by a bear was because I feared being killed.
And that fear of being killed Which is actually very common throughout human history.
Infanticide is 25 to 50% in primitive cultures.
The fear of being killed was kind of at the root of my experience of my family.
And it laid the foundation for the subsequent, I'm trying to think of a good word for it, the subsequent Obedience that I displayed and the obedience that I displayed was because I genuinely believed and not without reason that my mother would kill me if I didn't obey.
So I've been sort of thinking about that quite a bit over the last couple of days.
And I just was wondering what other people's thoughts are about that, if that makes any sense to people.
Greg, are you still there?
Greg?
Are we on still?
Oh, I can't hear anything.
You're on. Okay.
Yeah, so I think that was kind of the issue for me.
And I was thinking about some of the stories that we've heard from people on the board about parental violence and the threats of parental abandonment.
For Christina, it was more the threats of abandonment, like her parents threatened to call the police and have her taken away from the family forever, which to a child is the equivalent of a threat of murder.
And it's just been rolling around in my head.
If I grew up under the threat of death, like under the threat of murder, it does a lot to explain the way that I experienced my childhood and the fears that I have around authority or the fears that I have around brutality and so on.
Because it's not like a combat zone.
It is a combat zone insofar as If you don't do the right things, you'll die.
You'll be killed.
And certainly my mother had, and this is what my therapist said, that she had an unlived life as a murderer.
And this idea of the threat that parents have, I think that whenever violence comes into a family, the fundamental threat is that of murder.
Because why else would a child submit to that?
Certainly if a child is attacked by an animal, the child will bite, will scratch, will do whatever he can to escape or to fight back against the attack.
And I think that the reason that we don't do that with parents is because we unconsciously get this escalation reality.
What happens if we resist?
What happens if we fight back?
What happens if we draw a line in the sand and say, there will be no violence against me, I will take an eye for an eye?
I think as a kid, we believe, and again, not without reason, that we're going to be killed.
And I think, of course, the children who didn't have that mental inhibitor, so to speak, I don't think survived very long.
So that's the thoughts that I have.
If anybody else wanted to jump in or you can sort of sit and mull this over if you like.
I found it to be quite liberating and in a way quite relaxing to think back about growing up under the threat of murder.
And fortunately I can, I mean to some degree fortunately I can clearly remember that assault which could have gotten me killed or brain damaged or injured in some other pretty permanent way.
And as Greg was mentioning, the threat of institutionalization, which a child will experience as pretty much identical to the threat of murder, because it is the withdrawal of parental support and protection, which for any child throughout our sort of genetic history would have been the equivalent of death.
So anyway, that's sort of what I've been mulling over, and I was just wondering if anybody else had any thoughts about that or any other experiences that would be similar.
Well, it's impossible to stand on that principle at that age, on the principle that you're not going to accept any violence against yourself, right?
because just to carry that out we'll end it over Yeah, sorry Greg, you're going to have to type it into the chat window if you want to talk because I'm not getting anything other than the 10th syllable
Is there anyone else? And again, I know it's a pretty dark topic, but to me there was a real light at the end of the tunnel, which was a genuine understanding about the danger that I faced as a child, and a genuine appreciation of the dangerous situation that...
I had to navigate through, right?
This threat of death, this threat of murder is pretty significant, of course.
And certainly, just to sort of quibble with a point that Greg made, which I'll do very bravely because he can't speak back at the moment.
You can fight back as a kid if you're willing to take the risk that your parents won't escalate.
Right? So if they slap you and you bite them, Then if they say, okay, well, slapping isn't gonna work, so I'll stop doing that, then you will have done, you will have taken an action that will prevent for you from being slapped in the future.
If you're willing to take that risk, taking the risk that they won't escalate, right?
So they slap, you bite, they punch, you eye gouge, they punch even harder.
Right to the point where you have a concussion or something.
If you're willing to take the risk that there's not going to be an escalation, that there's going to be a re-evaluation of the parental strategy of violence if you fight back, then it would make sense to do that.
However, it seems that almost no children do want to take that risk and I think that's actually quite important because kids are actually fairly good at evaluating risks.
That's why they don't all die when they learn how to ride bikes.
They're pretty good. And evaluating risks.
But in this situation of parental violence, I've never met a child who just fights back to the death.
Because I think we all get deep down that what's behind all parental coercions is the threat of death.
Is the threat of being murdered.
Because they're just going to lose control or they're just not going to back down.
they're going to continue to escalate and they have size on their side.
I almost think there's like a form of humiliation of looks and stuff.
Go on. There's a form of humiliation in that, so when you fight back in the future, you really don't access the same feelings of self-preservation.
In my case, I would always get in fights in school and stuff and just not care about my well-being as much just because of the humiliation.
That I kind of got from my parents.
They never hit me like Greg or anything.
I mean, Greg's parents did or anything.
I didn't have his experience, but they would always break stuff around me.
So it would be like, you know, you're next.
Yeah, that's very clear.
If you punch the wall next to someone's head, that's 1% back from punching them in the head, right?
Sorry, did you hear that?
And I think you're absolutely right.
And this is the relief that this remembering gave me, which is I think that deep down, I always felt humiliated about giving in.
I always felt that I'd lost.
I always felt that I'd been overpowered.
I always felt that I'd been overmastered.
But it wasn't really your fault at all.
It was just going to happen. Well, yeah, it's easy to say, well, I was overpowered.
If all you remember is being slapped or punched or whatever, but when I thought about this incident when I was five with the perspective of she was gonna kill me if I didn't go limp, and that's why I went limp.
It's that same instinct, as I said, that kicks in when you're being attacked by a bear or something.
Then remembering that threat of murder makes it not cowardly for me to have given in in the future when I was a kid, if that makes sense.
I just meant at the time it felt humiliating.
Or at least I felt somehow some sort of unconscious humiliation.
I don't know about you, but I didn't experience that incident when I was five as humiliating.
I just experienced it as, I better go limp or, and I couldn't complete the thought when I was a kid.
I mean, the thought was there because I went limp.
I do remember really feeling that my spirit or my will was broken at that point.
When I was a kid, I've built it back since, but that was my last protest, fundamentally, was trying to run away when I was five.
After that, I just submitted.
Now, I got more punchy when I was a teenager, like we all did, because I got bigger and so on, and of course, I was closer to getting out, right?
I got out when I was 15, right?
So, I didn't experience it as humiliating Because it's humiliating if you surrender yourself.
It's not humiliating if you're going to get killed, right?
It's not humiliating to run from a bear, right?
I guess what I was trying to say was that, I mean, unconsciously, I guess I never accepted the fact that I was going to be killed, so...
It never really even crossed my mind, right?
But I think it was always there because I felt a real...
Kind of relaxation in me since I've really been mulling this over?
Yeah. I mean, if there's a great white shark in the water, we don't feel humiliated swimming for sure, right?
We feel electric danger and desire for security, right?
Yeah. Yeah, I don't want to go to Jurassic Park with the fences out.
Right, right. We don't say, but the kids in the car in the Jurassic Park movie that they're being humiliated by the Tyrannosaurus Rex, right?
Yeah. In fact, we'd say any kid who wanted to stand up and fight the Tyrannosaurus Rex, that the kid was crazy, foolish, stupid, right?
Yeah, but it's like we kind of make that heroic, those sort of values.
I mean, being crazy and stupid in our society is kind of like...
I mean, it's kind of glamorizing in a way.
I mean, in movies. I guess that's a different topic.
Sorry. It may be or it may not be.
I certainly think that false heroics is a kind of self-humiliation.
Like if you have a standard that you should not run from a bear, then you have a death wish, right?
That comes from something else.
But I think it's very interesting for me that I couldn't complete that thought.
If I don't go limp, dot, dot, dot, I couldn't consciously complete that thought.
If I don't go limp, she's going to kill me.
I'm going to die. I'm like 20 seconds away from being brained, from having my brains on the floor.
I mean, that goes just against everything you would ever want to feel.
I mean, it's almost like you would want to keep that unconscious, in your unconscious, rather than feel that consciously, because that would be...
Horrible to feel in a way.
Yeah, I think, I mean, because if you look at your parent and you think, they're going to kill me if I don't obey them, their irrational commandments, then I think it's pretty hard to function as a human being, as a child, right?
Yeah, and once you accept that, then I can say it would be easier to accept that sort of treatment by other people at this state.
So, I mean, just to tie that in, like...
I mean, for most of my life, I saw it like it was completely unconscious, the fact that if I did go against my parents' wishes.
They would eventually kill you.
I remember when I went to high school, I was never allowed to leave the lunchroom, but I just remember being so...
Oh, he just got all kinds of quiet.
Are you still there? Oh, we lost him.
I'll try adding him back if somebody else wants to jump in.
Steph, I was going to say, do you think sometimes it's due to the confusion between when your parent, well, some parents, certainly my perspective, they're telling you they love you and then they beat you and there's this confusion between what, you know, you feel, I don't want to be hit or anything like that, but There's that sort of problem between those two thoughts as a child, maybe.
Can you tell me a little bit more?
I'm not sure I quite follow. Okay.
I mean, I can only talk about my experience, of course, but the idea that when They beat you with a slipper or stick or whatever they choose to use as a child to discipline you, and then they tell you that they love you.
The child is kind of bounced between the parent loves me and the parent beats me, and it's that kind Maybe there's a certain amount of confusion in that.
I don't know whether that was with you personally, but perhaps I sort of sensed that was perhaps a certain amount of confusion myself regarding that.
Yeah, I mean, for myself, I did not feel that my mother loved me.
I think she had some affection towards me at times, you know, when I was pleasing her or whatever.
Or I know that she took some pleasure in me when I was...
A precocious and intelligent, blonde, blue-haired, cute little kid, you know, so when we'd be out and people would ooh and ah over me or whatever.
So I know that gave her some pleasure.
And she actually was a very good parent in many ways when I was sick, right?
Those are those glorious times that you remember being actually pampered and taken care of, right?
Sure, sure. So I don't...
I don't think I felt or got the love thing, but I also didn't get or feel, except really unconsciously, the murderous thing.
I completely concur with you on the feeling of absolute fear if I was to escalate it.
And I do understand that.
It's just an interesting point.
I just thought maybe there's a certain amount of confusion among certain children between what they're being told and what's actually happening to them, and they're trying to balance the two.
But you're talking about an innate thing that children fear, whatever that might be, fear of escalation or otherwise, I guess.
Yeah, I mean, it's just the cost benefit, right?
It's the cost benefit analysis that goes on when you're a child about resisting parental violence, which is that, yes, your childhood would be more pleasant if they back down at some point and decide that violence doesn't work because you'll do whatever it takes.
But if they decide to continue to escalate until you're dead, Then, you know, so it's like Pascal's wager, you know, like the upside is a more pleasant childhood.
And frankly, the gene pool doesn't care about the happiness of her childhood, right?
I mean, the gene pool cares about us having sex with people, and sometimes an unhappy childhood can actually make people want to have sex more, or at least more quickly.
So, from a gene pool's perspective...
Fighting the good fight in order to take the odds of having a better childhood would not be a plus, whereas submitting for fear of inevitable and constant escalation.
And of course, for parents, in order to gain the compliance of the child with the least amount of effort possible, that threat of abandonment or murder would actually be the most effective thing that they could do.
Yes. I mean, the fact that my mom, in all appearances, appeared willing to kill me made me a pretty compliant kid for quite a long time.
Sorry, Steph, I didn't catch that.
The fact that my mother was willing to, or appeared to be willing to kill me, actually made me a pretty compliant kid for a pretty long time.
Yeah, I mean, I think I understand what you're saying, that the fear aspect allows a child to comply with their parents.
And why that happens, I agree, is a deeper, is sometimes a much more complicated reason.
But I know from my own experience it was sheer fear.
And I knew that if I escalated it.
And I did think about it.
I remember thinking about...
Fighting back. I used to have dreams about it.
I remember in some ways about fighting back against my father's brutality.
And not nightmares, just dreams in a sense of...
Daydreams kind of thing. This is daydreams, yeah.
But of course, I realized very, very...
I mean, particularly when I became a teenager, I used to fight back a lot more easily, and then he threatened me with You know, what they call it, not Borstal, but you know with children's homes and stuff like that.
And I very, very quickly realized that he would quite happily throw me to one side, you know, for his own life.
No problem at all.
And so I backed down very, very seriously.
Well, and of course our genes for how to behave as children did not arise when foster homes were around, right?
No, that's true.
A day arose when you'd be stuck in a snowbank, right?
The funny thing is I did know people who were in children's homes and in my own personal experience, some friends of mine who were, We're gay prostitutes, and it was not a very pleasant...
I knew a little bit about a history of 15 years old, and I wasn't at all interested in that.
No, I certainly remember thinking about that and coming to the conclusion, even at the age of 13 or so, that it would just be a fate worse than death, right?
Yeah, yeah. Better the devil you know, right?
Yes. That's interesting.
Okay. Was there anything else that you wanted to add to this at the moment?
Well, no, Steph, no. It's just my little bit.
I appreciate that. That's good.
good.
That's very helpful.
Was there anyone else who wanted to jump in on this grimest of grim topics?
Hi, Steph.
I had a thought that I've been formulating for about the past 10 minutes and you guys have been talking about this.
I just wanted to ask, I mean, like, the thing you said, you know, kids are pretty good at risk analysis, I guess.
You know, is that what you said before?
Yes. So, my thought was that...
Now, see, I wasn't physically abused as a child, so, like, you know, I could be completely off base here.
It seems to me if you're, like, a seven-year-old kid and...
Your parents are, you know, inflicting some kind of violence against you.
I feel like the fear could also just be of pain in general because it's like, well, maybe if I just stop fighting, they'll stop, you know, hurting me.
But I know that if I fight back, even if they don't kill me, they might do something to me and it will cause me pain.
You know, and I feel like in the moment, that might be all you're really worried about.
I don't know, would that maybe mean that sometimes it can just be a fear of pain and not a fear of death, so to speak?
I mean, I think you could be right.
The things that I would throw against that thesis, I don't know if they'll stick as yet or not, but the things that come to mind, and I think that's a great thesis, is that children will suffer pain in order to gain things, right?
So children will do stunts on their bikes, they will...
They're constantly falling and skinning their knees in order to gain skills, in order to gain prestige.
So children are quite willing to suffer in order to gain things in their lives.
They're willing to suffer physical pain.
That was certainly my childhood.
I don't know if that was similar for you.
I'm sorry, Steph, you just cut out for a lot of that towards the beginning.
Children are perfectly happy to, well, not perfectly happy, children are willing to suffer physical pain in order to gain particular advantage, to learn a new skill on a bike, to do a wheelie, to gain social prestige, in sports, to tackle, to, like, they're willing to accept pain.
And childhood is kind of a string of injuries, right?
So children are willing to accept physical pain in order to gain particular ends.
Hmm. Okay. I didn't find that to be my experience as much.
I recall being very unhappy with pain ever.
But you learned how to ride a bike and stuff, and you probably fell when that was going on and so on.
Right, yeah. I mean, we used training wheels at the beginning, but I do recall falling off.
I'm very unhappy that I fell, but I did get back on and try again.
So, yeah.
Okay, I see your point. And the other thing that I would say, too, is that If a child says, well, pain is an inconvenience to me, then he will innately also understand that pain is an inconvenience to his parents, right?
And therefore, if he bites or scratches or pokes or whatever when he's being attacked, then he is going to create an inconvenience, a negative incentive for his parents to do it again, right?
Yeah, that makes sense. So, in the terms of risk calculation, if a child has a 90% chance of stopping all future beatings with only a 5% chance of having an additional injury inflicted on him in the moment, it seems to me likely that a child would take that risk.
Well, I guess what I would say is that a child, in terms of risk calculation, again, would go, this parent is about three times my size.
There's no way I could inflict as much pain on them as they could inflict on me.
Well, that's true, but the thing is that if that's true, then the child is already facing the threat of murder, right?
Because you can actually inflict a lot of pain on an adult as a child, right?
As I say, you bite, very painful.
You can stab with a pencil or a knife.
You can gouge eyes.
You can do things that are pretty violent and difficult for a parent to deal with, right?
Certainly, yeah. So, if the child says, well, I'm not going to do that because the parent is going to escalate, if I inflict 10 units of pain, the parent is going to inflict 50, right?
And then the child could then say, well, then I'm going to inflict 60 units of pain, well, then the parent's going to inflict 150, that just escalates until someone dies, and the person who's going to die is going to be the kid, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay. Yeah, I guess that's a natural understanding, and that very well could be the case.
I don't think it's something they're thinking of consciously, but I think you said that.
Yeah, no, you're right. It's not a conscious calculation any more than it's a conscious calculation of the odds of falling off a bike, but we do generally get a sense, right?
And I'm just, to me, I'm interested why all children choose obedience.
I mean, all children that I know of choose obedience.
And interestingly enough, To obedience from a threat of murder, what happens is often they will end up as adults taking it out on other people, right?
This fear of murder, this death that they have inhabited, they will actually inflict it on other people.
And we can think of this in terms of soldiers or police or criminals or whatever.
There was this guy that somebody posted on the board, this kid who was, I think he was 20 or something like that.
It was from a Rolling Stone article.
And it was about a kid who had, you know, just had this completely wretched life.
And he'd gone to a mall and shot up a bunch of people.
I was sort of just mulling this over.
This is, what was his name?
I've got it... It was Omaha, Nebraska, West Roads Mall, this kid shot up a bunch of people.
And so this idea that the acting out occurs against others also seems like if you're threatened with murder, and this kid definitely was throughout most of his childhood and was sexually abused as an infant to boot, If you live under this threat of murder, then it seems that when you grow up, you end up taking it out on other people.
Not those who abused you, but others.
And I think that's pretty foundational to the violence in the world.
Does anybody have...
Sorry, somebody just asked here, do young kids really understand what death means?
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Certainly they understand that when I was five I had certainly some inkling of death.
I mean, you see flies that stop moving when they fly too long against the windowsill.
And for sure, I certainly had an idea that having my head pounded against a door was not going to be particularly good for my health.
And actually, I remember later when I was in boarding school, this was not an incident of child abuse, but a kid, his name was Grant, Tried to dove into the swimming pool slipped hit his head and was actually completely functionally retarded from from there on just had some sort of I don't know I think he went into the water and lost oxygen because people didn't notice him in there with everyone splashing around and That I remember being particularly chilling and I remember that with reference to this this attack when I was five and All right.
If anybody has anything else to add, feel free.
Otherwise, we can close it down.
Which chat window are you watching?
I just have the one, the FDR live chat.
Okay. Because I just had a quick question on what you were saying.
Maybe the fact that We withdraw from escalating is actually because of the desire to avoid the contradiction and not necessarily to avoid death.
To avoid, sorry, the contradiction of...
Well, the contradiction that we want to believe that our parents love us and that they're our protectors, but then at the same time being faced with the threat of death, if we escalate.
So it's not necessarily death that is being avoided, but having to face down that contradiction.
You could be right again.
That seems pretty abstract and philosophical for me, like children wish to avoid contradiction rather than death.
I mean, death seems like more of an immediate and obvious danger for the child.
And of course, if it is a real contradiction, in other words, if the parent says, I love you, but if you don't obey me, I'll kill you.
If the child experiences that as a contradiction, it's only because he believes that the parent is willing to do that, or capable of killing him, right?
Right. Right, in the first place, right.
Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, that's true.
Okay. Somebody asked, can we feel sympathy for our abusers at five years old?
I don't think so.
I don't think we can feel sympathy for our abusers at any time.
I think that we can feel sympathy for the people who have abused others and abusers as a category, but I don't think that we can feel genuine sympathy for people who have pillaged our childhoods and made our formative years a living hell.
I don't think that would be a healthy goal to try and achieve, if that makes sense.
sense.
All right, I'll just give it a short pause in case anybody else wanted to add anything to this topic.
All right, well, thanks everyone.
I appreciate it. I know it's a grim topic.
I appreciate the sharing.
I'm going to post this with With some notes from the study that I read about from this journal.
And we'll see what ripple effect it has.
It certainly had a very strong ripple effect for me.
And we'll see what it does in the community as a whole.
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