Someone once told me that she likes it when she gets a bruise. She does not cover it up. She goes out with it showing.
Put like that, it does not add up. A bruise is where something hurt, and most people would rather it were not on display. Then you hear why she says it, and it makes perfect sense.
Her body did not bruise
Her mother hit her a lot when she was a child. And her body did not bruise.
For her, the absence of a bruise was no relief. If a bruise had come up, her father could have seen it in the evening. She was not waiting for a chance to tell him herself. She was waiting for him to see it first and ask what had happened to her. But nothing stayed on her body to be seen. What was done to her in the day had left no trace by evening, and she was left alone with it.
So she said she hated her own body. Not the places she was hit. The body that kept no record of having been hit.
If her father found out, it would come back on her
But even if her father had found out, it would not have been simple. If he saw a mark and asked her mother about it, it would come out that her mother had done it, and her mother would be in trouble. After that, the child would be made to pay for it. The word she used was retaliation.
So she was stuck either way. If a bruise showed, her father might find out, and then the retaliation would come. If no bruise showed, there was nothing for him to see, and no way for him to find out at all. Either way, what was happening to her had nowhere to go. And she could not tell him.
A memory with nowhere to go gets shut away
She put the next part plainly herself. If a child went on remembering all of this, she could not bear it; she would go out of her mind. So a child shuts these painful memories away, somewhere even she cannot get at them. That place is what is called the unconscious.
Once the memories are shut away, it looks as if they are gone. But the body keeps doing what it did back then. In her case, it showed in the way she slept.
She had been hit so much, she said, that she did not think she was a person. She thought she was a caterpillar. Until she went through what she calls her healing process, she slept at the very edge of the bed, curled up the way a caterpillar curls. She made small crying sounds in her sleep. As a child she could not cry, because crying got her into trouble, and that crying came out later, in her sleep. Her husband found it hard to watch.
What can a caterpillar do at school?
That was her question, not mine. She was very bad at school and always came bottom of the class.
Her mother made her study with a cane laid down beside her. She could not concentrate. The cane was right there, she never knew when she would be hit with it, and the fear took hold of her. Her dictation tests, where words are read out and the child writes them down, came back at 20 out of 100, every day.
It is easy to get this the wrong way round. The cane was not beside her because she did badly. She did badly because the cane was beside her. The whole time she sat there, all her attention was used up on watching the cane and guessing when she might be hit, and none was left for the words she was meant to write down.
The 95 she was not allowed to put up
In primary school she scored 95 once. In those days marked test papers were hung up for everyone to see, and she wondered aloud whether it was done to shame the children. Down at the bottom there were zeros, and twenties. She put her 95 up at the very top, and her mother would not let her.
The 20 came every day. The 95 came once and was not allowed up there at all. The hitting left no mark on her body, and what she did well was not allowed to be seen. There was nowhere anyone could see what was happening to her, or what she could do. So self-esteem never formed in her: the sense that you are a decent person, a feeling of your own worth.
She passed, and could not take it in
How far does this missing sense of worth reach? All the way to an exam she sat as a grown woman.
A few years ago she passed a counsellor’s examination. When you pass, you simply take it that you passed. She could not. Instead these thoughts came: “The computer marking must have been wrong. They will ring to tell me I failed after all. And if nobody rings, I must have only just scraped through.” She said she caught herself thinking like this.
It was the 95 all over again. When she was a child, her mother would not let her put the 95 up. This time her mother was not there to do it, so she did it herself: she took down her own pass, telling herself it must have been a marking error, or that she had only just scraped through.
A child who could do nothing makes up for it with strength
When she was being hit, her mother was strong and a small child could do nothing. Being in a situation where there is nothing at all you can do — that is powerlessness. Her body, which would not bruise, showed that powerlessness plainly: she was being hit, and not even a mark was left to show it.
A child does not just leave powerlessness as it is. While she was being hit, she could do nothing. So later she went the opposite way: instead of doing nothing, she pushed ahead with all her strength. Making up like this for what you could not do before is called compensation. Through it, a great deal of strength built up in her, a strength that would not give in. That strength is what is called aggression.
Aggression is a word that sounds like a fault. If it is seen as a fault, she becomes someone who has to keep her own strength held down. Then she is once again someone who can do nothing, and the powerlessness comes a second time. Here she mentioned Winnicott, a paediatrician and psychoanalyst, who did not see it that way. He wrote about aggression in a small child as being almost the same thing as activity: not a fault, but a sign of life. In his view, as she put it, aggression is not a bad thing at all; it turns into energy. She said that in her own life this strength is being put to good use, and that she now has energy to spare.
She likes it when she bruises
Back to where this started. She still likes it when she bruises. She does not keep the mark covered; she leaves it showing and goes about her day. She said this comes from never bruising as a child. Back then she hated her body for keeping no mark. Now, as a grown woman, she is glad whenever a bruise comes up.
Once you have heard this much, you can see what keeps coming back. It is not the hitting itself. It is the situation in which there was nothing she could do. It came back as a body curled at the edge of a bed. It came back as 20 out of 100, every day. It came back as a pass she could not take in.
There are things in each of us that are hard to explain to anyone else. Usually they are ways we found as children to get through a situation where we could do nothing. Only the way of getting through stays, and it keeps coming out even in situations that have nothing to do with the old one.
But one more thing came out of that same situation where she could do nothing: strength, the energy she now has to spare. And when she told me about sleeping curled up at the edge of the bed, she said, “until I went through the healing process.” That means she does not sleep that way now.
References
- Winnicott, D. W. (1950). Aggression in Relation to Emotional Development. In Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis (1958). — aggression read not as a fault but as energy.
Related
- “That’s Just Me”: When Looking Back Turns Into Self-Attack
- What Did I Do to Deserve This? Punishments End. This Doesn’t.
- The Child Who Was No Trouble at All
Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board