I would not wish on any person in the world that they should suffer abuse in childhood.
Not abuse, not emotional neglect, and heaven forbid that they should pass their first years feeling unloved.
We are not genuinely capable of understanding the terror, the abandonment and the profound loss of trust that accompany such an injury.
They really are victims. All of them, every one. It was not their fault and it was not their responsibility.
But then the years pass. And the victim is the scenario we came to talk about this morning.
The injured party becomes the injuring one.
The victim becomes the monster.
In slightly less dramatic words, the aggression is turned outwards, mainly towards those closest — and to put it more bluntly, towards romantic partners.
At first this surprises and shakes their partners. She asks him in astonishment: what has got into you?
Afterwards, people get used to it. They cut off, or they try to live with it, because she is simply like that, or because it is his character.
Why does this happen? Why?
I have three explanations for this phenomenon, in which a childhood victim becomes a monster in adulthood.
Please read this coldly. Do not try to generalise it to your own life. Certainly not immediately.
One. The victim is operated by the unconscious and experiences the injury continually anew.
Our unconscious is a genuine idiot. An eternal child. It has no adult concepts of time. As far as it is concerned, there is no difference between an injury that occurred in 1997 and the recollection of that injury now.
As far as the unconscious is concerned, both are happening now. Right now.
And therefore, if you express a not very forceful complaint to her — move yourself, we should have been there ten minutes ago — she is not hearing your mild irritation. She is hearing a much older voice, at full volume.
Two. Aggression is the only form of agency they were ever shown. If the model available in childhood was that power belongs to whoever is willing to frighten, then in adulthood, feeling powerless produces the only response that was ever demonstrated.
Three, and hardest. Being a victim confers moral immunity, and moral immunity is very difficult to give up. If I am the one who was wronged, then whatever I do now is a response rather than an act — and responses do not require apology.
None of this makes it acceptable. It makes it explicable, which is a different thing and a more useful one. Because the person on the receiving end is not required to absorb it in the name of understanding its origin.