Ask where cruelty comes from and most people start with a frightening parent. That is not the concept. The question is not whether somebody frightening was standing in the room. It is whether good care was given. Fail to get proper care from a parent and fear is left behind, by itself. Not having been looked after is already, on its own, exposure to a frightening situation. Why the absence of care counts as harm at all, I have written out separately in No One Hit You, So You Thought It Wasn’t Abuse. What I want to follow here is what that fear does next.
A country at war
Once fear has settled in, the world goes bleak. And when the world is bleak, what posture does a person take? Look at a country at war. The moment war breaks out, everybody moves into one state — a paranoid state. From then on people suspect each other, take up a defensive stance so as not to be the one who gets hit, and order and law come apart. The whole thing can go primitive. One thing produced all of that. Fear did.
The people who commit crimes are the people who are shaking with fear. A person does not become a criminal by being bad. It is the cry he lets out in order to survive that wounds the person next to him. What this piece is after is the turn itself — how fear that was done to a person comes back around and gets pointed at somebody else.
It registers as one sentence
Being exposed to a frightening environment registers inside the person as a single sentence. I was done to. That is the feeling it is carried in as.
And a human being repeats the experience he has. Good or bad, it repeats. So the more fear someone felt, the more the opposite capacity develops: by the time he is grown and has some strength of his own, what has grown in him is the ability to make other people afraid. He does not stay put in the place where it was done to him. The direction flips.
The man who rang only women when he was drunk
There was a case like this. A man with alcohol addiction. Once he was properly drunk he would ring women, and only women — men he hardly called at all. What the person on the other end of the line felt was fear, the kind that goes through you. Set the words down on paper and it looks like ordinary conversation. It is what comes off the call that does it. That is how much fear one person can hand to another, and how strongly.
And this man had taken in that much fear himself, as a child.
There is no intention in it
Here is where it divides. He is not handing out fear on purpose. He does not decide that he is going to frighten this person and then go and do it. When an experience repeats itself it runs through an unconscious state. As far as he is concerned he is expressing himself — and the expression terrifies the person in front of him. All violence and all destruction come out of the experience of having been frightened.
What was taken has to be got back
There is a second mechanism that stands alongside the first: deprivation. The word says what it is. Something was given, early on, and afterwards it was taken away. That is deprivation.
The thought of having been robbed produces a very strong pull to get the thing back. I lost it, so I have to recover it. But the recovering can turn into theft. There is a second half to it as well. The space where the thing should have been is standing empty, so the person moves to fill it — and greed is stimulated at that same spot. He takes more than the amount.
From outside, this is intrusion, and it is violent. To the person who lived through the deprivation, it feels legitimate. Legitimate is the word for it. The feeling is already in place before the act is.
When the alarm is on, nothing good gets in
Back to the fear, and to where it works in the body. In the middle of the brain sits the amygdala, and what it sets off is the fear signal, the alarm. Our surroundings are dangerous right now, so choose quickly — attack, or run, or stay frozen and do not move. It puts the body into a state of arousal. In that state a person has no room in him.
And then nothing gets in. No good word gets in, not while that state is running. In a conversation between a husband and wife, or when somebody is criticising you, you make no effort to understand what the person is actually saying. Let somebody criticise you and the only thing going on in you is working out how to hit back. Praise that lands and leaves nothing behind is a different problem, built slowly over years (Someone Praised You and It Didn’t Land). What I mean here is narrower than that: the arousal is switched on at this moment, and that is why nothing is getting through.
That is just the normal shape of a human being
None of this is an illness. That is just the normal shape of a human being. Which is why you talk to someone rather than criticise them — it is the only way anything passes in both directions. And even with no criticism in it, speech carries a wavelength. Send an aggressive wavelength out and the other person picks it up at once and begins responding aggressively, whatever the words were.
Related
- Fail to Love Yourself and It Goes Straight to Abuse. There Is No Middle Ground.
- They Really Did Become the Person I Was Afraid Of
- I Get So Angry I Want to Break Everything, Including Me
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