Something dawned on me today. It came into stark clarity in a way that I have never actually realized before. Put simply: violence spreads. Trauma does not affect just the direct parties, but spreads as a wound through a larger community. While I don’t think this is particularly noteworthy, my realization was that this violence can be self-directed, and can harmfully spread to a larger community, namely our loved ones.
Most of us are familiar with the outward expression of self-destruction, and how it affects the people around us. If we cut, or we self harm in an outward way, that is an act of violence that deeply affects the people who love us. When put into a dangerous context, it can act as a manner of unconscious manipulation to those we love. Again, this is not something that I really thought was news worthy.
My realization is that there are those of us, those like me, who are so demanding of themselves for whatever reason, that when we fail, we torture our inner child with the cruelty that is saved for only the most depraved scenes played out in theater. We are violent. We are violent to ourselves, and we are violent with ourselves internally, where no one can see. This violence, like any other trend of violence, requires rehabilitation.
I realized today that when we share this internal violence with the people we love, who are not trained psychotherapists, that we are doing the same as cutting ourselves in front of them. We are harming ourselves, bleeding, screaming “why don’t you love me enough to stop this!” As a more concrete example, it is very easy to go from self-doubt and being insecure to suddenly saying
“I’m clearly too stupid to get what you’re saying.” “You will never love me.” “I am not good enough for anyone to love me.”
These are words of self harm. These are words that tell the little boy or little girl within us that they will never been good enough, that they are stupid, that they are worthless. If we saw this playing out between an actual parent and their child, we would all want to defend the child. We all carry this inner child with us, so when we play out this drama internally, we perpetuate violence against ourselves, in a very deep, very real way.
What happens then is that, those of us who like to think ourselves emotionally aware, will share this with others. But this is akin to sharing a scene of domestic abuse with a person who is incapable of stopping it and saying “watch this violence, see how you should stop it.” We all generally have a calling to save people from violence, and when we cannot it puts us into an extremely uncomfortable state where the trauma of the violence perpetuates to us.
Therefore it is our duty, and our responsibility, to the people that we love, that we own this internal violence and that we do not share it with them. It is our responsibility to seek help from those qualified to help us, such as psychotherapists, rather than from our friends.
When we do not take responsibility for these behaviors, it can have devastating effects. Much in the same way that a child is undefended against watching his parents abuse each other, the constant exposure to another’s internal violence will chip away at our walls, calling out the savior in each of us, that higher person who loves and cares. This is extremely dangerous and compromising situation. It can easily lead to the person who is trying to help being attacked themselves for helping insufficiently, or for not knowing how to help properly.
I cannot stress this point enough. Violence spreads. Trauma spreads. This means that the longer you are internally violent and display this to the people who love you, the more you will draw them into the violence, and the closer you will get to being violent with them. If we wish to not hurt those we love, we must first and foremost stop hurting ourselves, and if we cannot do that immediately, we must cease sharing the violence against ourselves with them, and find help.
