Your Parents May Have Trained You But You Choose To Be The Monster
“My parents made me into a monster.”
Did they? Or were they monsters to you? Because your parents aren’t here. They aren’t making these decisions for you. You are. Every choice you make pushes you closer and closer to being the very thing you claim to despise. You aren’t even imitating them anymore, you’ve surpassed them. And it has been your choice to do that.
“They shaped me this way.”
And you choose to stay this way. You choose to enhance it. You choose to continue walking this path. Where are your parents now, other than in your head? Are they somewhere holding a gun on you, threatening to kill you if you make a decision they don’t agree with? Are they threatening to punish you if you don’t do what they want? Are they still holding power over adult you that you cannot escape?
I get where you’re coming from. I really do. The people who had the responsibility of raising you and treating you with kindness and respect didn’t do that. They abused your love and trust for them. They exploited it and mocked you for caring about them and their feelings. They intentionally harmed you and called it playing. They accused you of overreacting when they intentionally inflicted pain. They were wrong in so many ways, cruel, dangerous, abusive…your parents were not good parents and they definitely weren’t good to or for you.
They entwined love and hate and weaponized it against you. You learned that love, caring, and vulnerability equals pain and harm. You learned that trust leads to heartache and that no one is safe. You learned terrible lessons from terrible people, and those lessons have become a part of you. And now you seek the same power your parents had over you and you form relationships with people who are just as open and trusting as you were only to abuse them the same way your parents abused you. You revel in the joy as well as the disgust that power makes you feel. Then you wonder why people leave you. You wonder why people avoid you. You wonder what happened to the friends of your past and then blame them for not loving you enough to endure your bullshit. It’s never you, always them.
This feeds your fear of relationships. It exacerbates your fear of trust and being vulnerable. You hate it but you are scared to want better. You don’t trust that better is a thing that can happen for you so you do everything you can to ensure you are the most powerful one in your social situations under the mistaken belief that it makes you safe when all it does it keep you lonely.
Your parents may have been the monsters who birthed you and kept you alive but you are the one choosing to be the bigger better version of what they were. You claim to be confused that people don’t like you when you don’t even like yourself. You wonder what you can do to keep people in your life. You take the next step — you pretend the monster doesn’t exist long enough to legally tie someone to you. You find a way to make the monster palatable to at least one other person. Then you marry, have kids, and now you have the captive audience you need to let your monster free. The circle is complete and the next iteration of monsters is being trained because children can’t leave. Limited emotional intelligence and stunted emotional growth find fertile ground in another generation.
At least, that’s one way this could go. You still have a choice in all this. You still can choose to confront your pain, unpack your harm, learn the ways it continues to manifest in your life and your relationships and then develop ways to manage and possibly eliminate them. You can change this course, but instead, you continue to chose to ignore it. Again and again, you choose to be the very thing you both love and hate. You keep doing the work to exceed at being the monsters you wish never raised you. You tell yourself that changing is impossible and that people need to accept you and your shitty behavior as you are. You don’t have to be this person, yet this is what you choose to default being. All I want to know is why? Why are you so intent on being the worst version of yourself when there are so many other options?
“There are no options for me. This is just who I am. You can take it or leave it.”
I don’t issue applications for new monsters and I do not have to keep them in my life. You have the capacity to change this shit but you have to want it. Every day you decide who you want to be and every choice you make reinforces it. If this is who you want to be, so be it. But we can’t exist in the same space. That’s earmarked for someone who chooses to deal with their shit and grow from it.
I’m going to give you some space to think about this because I think you’re better than you choose to be. Or, maybe this is exactly who you are, and I need to accept that. The day I finally accept that is not gonna be a good day for you. That’s not a warning; it’s a promise.
“Fuck you.”
And that is my cue to leave. I hope you get your shit together but I won’t hold my breath. Have a nice life.
I remember being a shitty human. I mean, in some ways I still am but I am consistently making decisions to be less so. I have chosen my path and it is challenging but I am working for something better that I continue to reflect on and adjust as needed.
There was a time when I was less in-tune with my emotional self. Where I didn’t understand what I felt and punished everyone around me when I was harmed. I internalized a lot of cruelty and treated people in kind. Part of my journey has been understanding why I was who I was, forgiving myself, and learning from it while choosing who I want to be. My circumstances are different from those at the beginning of this piece. My parents did not set out to hurt me. They weren’t intentionally emotionally abusive. We lived in poverty and they did everything they could to care for us, which included some hard decisions that were still traumatic. But that wasn’t the case for the people I’m referencing above.
I meet people whose parents were cruel for the sake of being cruel. Parents who took pleasure in tormenting their children; who enjoyed lying to them and misleading them, violating the unconditional trust and love that these people they brought into the world had for them. I watched those parents become parents and do the same fuckshit to their children, calling it “jokes” while mocking their children for believing them. And when I see it, I know that this is unacknowledged trauma that needs to be addressed but is instead dismissed as unimportant.
The reality is that we all have trauma for varying reasons. Colonization was intended to be traumatizing. It is much easier to destroy and dominate people who are weakened on multiple fronts — by disease, torture, kidnapping, massive genocides, rape, and whatever other things can be used against them. Colonists routinely saw empathy and kindness as access points for exploitation and destruction. Deceit is the norm. Threats are the norm. Abuse is ingrained into our DNA because it is the actual tool used to subjugate others. Power is interpreted as not just the ability to avoid abuse but the authority to inflict it on others. People see suffering as something to be inflicted and endured, especially in service to those who have never experienced it. The hope of power is the carrot on the stick for anyone who has been abused and rather than break the stick, we figure out how to make our own to lure and lead someone with less autonomy than ourselves.
We are the cogs in the machine of perpetual human monsters and we’re so indoctrinated into it that we don’t question what we’re doing or why.
Regardless of how we were traumatized, we can choose not to perpetuate it. We can choose to break the cycle. Just like kindness, abuse is learned and can be unlearned. The key is that you have to want to change. You have to be honest with who you are, what you do, and then want to change it. Even though it’s work. Even though it’s painful. Even though it takes years and can fucking suck beyond all belief. If you don’t want to change it, you never will.
My moment of clarity happened in my late 20s. I was so desperately unhappy and I wanted something different for myself. I was tired of reacting and responding to the shit that hurt me. I knew I wanted more people in my life, strong friendships, community. Ten-plus years later, I’m still figuring out what looks like because I continue to grow and my needs continue to change but I trust myself and pay attention to my emotional needs. It took time to develop the emotional intelligence to recognize what I feel — we are often denied the freedom to explore our emotions and suppress them to survive, but as we get older and have more control of our environment, we can make the space to do exactly that.
This type of growth isn’t a one-time decision. It’s an all the time decision. Every choice you make in your life will move you closer to something. You need to decide what that something is and then fight for that shit. Unless it’s white supremacist patriarchal capitalism and any other kinds of oppressing marginalized identities and communities — if that’s your goal, just die already. I truly mean that shit.
Too many people are fighting to be the lead oppressor instead of dismantling the oppression and this shit cannot co-exist. The lie that it can has been completely exposed and anyone pushing the narrative that they can co-exist is a liar and dangerous as fuck. If that’s you, then you are a liar and dangerous as fuck. You need to start examining yourself and learning how you are a more evolved monster than your parents and then deal with that shit. Steep yourself in it, embrace it, and then neutralize it. It’s life-long work, but doable life-long work. We can’t keep coasting in this sewage of a society. The poison is killing us.
Choose to do the work. Choose to do better. The world needs it desperately.
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Originally published at https://talynnkel.com on December 1, 2019.
