Every overt act of abuse is inflicted on its victim with contempt, which is a poisonous mixture of intimidation and disgust. The emotional energy of contempt is a traumatizing force of its own.
It is routinely used by ordinary parents all around the world when they needle and prod and stab and blast their children with verbal-emotional abuse. An intimidating burst of speech or even a physical show of force by itself is not damaging enough to grind away at inconvenient sharp edges of a child’s budding personality. The act must be infused with disgust through a rejecting tone of voice, a glaring look, a furrowed brow—reminders to the child that he is repulsive when his parent wants him to be. He quickly learns what is expected of him: sacrifice the least precious parts of himself by placing them in the line of fire of parental scorn, bury the most precious parts, and pretend that nothing feels wrong.
Expressions of contempt can be subtle enough to allow their perpetrators to comfortably hide behind shields of plausible deniability. Scoffing, brushing off, ignoring, giving “advice,” criticizing, and using sarcasm, among many other tactics, can be passed off as boundary setting or guidance while in fact being loaded with both intimidation and disgust. The specific mixture and amount force fed to the child depends on the parent’s levels of insecurity, repressed rage and need for a sense of control or superiority.
A child can only grow her sense of self out of the psychic materials provided to her. When parental attention is charged with contempt—as it often is by so many parents who consider themselves healthy—a seed of mortal fear and toxic shame is planted right up against the core of her being. Fertilized by rejection from the very people who should be consistently safe, this fear and shame constrict who she is allowed to be, warping her development. She becomes skilled at avoiding further rejection at any cost.
In families where contempt is expressed by one or both parents toward the children there is a simple yet strictly enforced rule: children may not protest against the one-way flow of intimidation and disgust. A contemptuous parent’s lecturing must not be interrupted or else the tone will immediately be made harsher. A punishing silent treatment must be quietly accepted until the parent decides to end it or else the term of exile will be extended. The child is caught in an emotional arm lock where any movement toward defending or freeing themselves results in more pain. This solidifies the power structure of the family with interpersonal fear and self loathing, which are internalized versions of parental intimidation and disgust.
Children who grow up in such families are traumatized into accepting this state of affairs as natural, making them perfectly suited to become adults in a society where those who hold power and status are allowed to intimidate the less powerful (often in quite subtle ways) and to express disgust toward them with impunity. Their freedom depends on fully rediscovering their painful sense of injustice.
Beyond the Family Cult 