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 the sentence is exact.
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 not relief. A visible mark might have made her father notice and ask what happened without requiring her to risk telling first. Because the body showed nothing, the violence left no evidence another adult could see, and the child remained 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.
Telling her father would come back on her
Telling was not simple either. If her father 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. And then it came back on the child. She used the word retaliation.
Both possibilities felt dangerous. A bruise might expose the mother and bring retaliation against the child. No bruise meant there was nothing to support the child’s account. Because disclosure seemed likely either to fail or make the violence worse, she remained silent.
A memory with nowhere to go gets shut away
She put the next part plainly herself. The painful memories get shut away, because a child who went on remembering them would go out of her mind. Shut away somewhere she cannot reach either — the unconscious.
Once the memories become unconscious, the child may no longer recall them clearly. But the body continues the protective responses learned then: curling small, suppressing crying, staying at the edge, and remaining alert during sleep.
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 the healing work 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. So there is no concentrating. The cane is there, she does not know when it will be used, and the fear takes hold of her. Her dictation came back at 20 out of 100, every day.
It is easy to reverse the cause and effect. The cane was presented as a response to poor performance, but the threat itself impaired performance. Her attention went to predicting when she might be hit, leaving too little concentration for the dictation task.
The 95 she was not allowed to put up
In primary school she scored 95 once. In those days the marked papers were pegged up on display, and she wondered aloud whether it was done to shame the children. There were zeros down at the bottom, and twenties. She put her 95 up at the top. Her mother would not have it up there.
The 20 came every day. The 95 came once and was not allowed up there at all. What was done to her left nothing on her body, and what she did well could not go up on the wall. There is not one place outside the child where she can be seen. That is how the sense that you are a decent person — self-esteem, a feeling of your own worth — never forms.
She passed, and could not take it in
How far does this go? It goes as far as an exam she sat as a grown woman.
A few years ago she passed a counsellor’s examination. You pass, and then you accept that you passed. That did not happen. The computer marking must have been wrong. The school will ring to say she has failed after all. And if no call comes, then she only just scraped through. She said she watched herself doing it.
The examination repeated the earlier pattern. As a child, her mother removed the evidence that she had done well. As an adult, she had internalized that response and removed the achievement herself by calling it an error or a narrow pass.
Where nothing could be done, force fills in
When she was being hit, her mother was strong and a small child could do nothing. Nothing I can do here, in this spot — that is powerlessness. A body that did not bruise was the place where the powerlessness showed plainly. She was being hit, and the fact of being hit did not even stay on her.
A child does not leave powerlessness alone. Back then nothing could be pushed back. So the force turns around and pushes now instead (compensation). What comes up is a great deal of force. This is what is called aggression.
Aggression is a word that sounds like a fault. Take it as a fault and the person becomes somebody who has to sit on her own force, and then the powerlessness arrives a second time. She said Winnicott did not read it that way — that in his view this force is not a bad thing at all, and turns into energy. Winnicott, a paediatrician and psychoanalyst, wrote about aggression in a small child as being almost the same thing as activity: not a fault, but a sign of life. She said that force of hers gets put to good use now, and that she 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. The mark that never came up when she was small has stayed with her. It comes back now, in an adult, as gladness when one does.
Listen that far and you can see what it is that repeats. It is not the number of times she was hit. It is the position in which nothing could be done. It repeats as a body curled at the edge of a bed. It repeats as 20 out of 100, every day. It repeats as a pass that cannot be taken in.
But force came out of that same spot too. Telling me about sleeping curled up, she said until I went through the healing. Which 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