"but How Do You Feel?"

One of the most destructive and permanently damaging things that anyone can do to a child is to make a child unable to feel.

This can take a number of different forms. In some instances it is considered "culturally unacceptable" for a person, a child, and especially a male, to even have, much less express, normal emotions. They are told such things as "Boys don't cry! Be a man!" occasionally peppered with ridicule, sarcasm, berating terms as "sissy," "lily-liver," "Mama's boy," and a few other unprintables. A child learns that it is not safe to express feelings-- and that it isn't really safe to feel them either. In other instances, positive feelings such as joy are also shut down, as an adult berates a child who is showing normal joviality with "Quit acting so happy!" In some areas it is also popular to employ this tactic on the youngest of children-- instead of being open to a child's needs, expecting him to "tend to himself" if he falls, or keeping a pacifier stuck in an infant's mouth.

But whether it is cultural influence, or someone who has actually committed abuse against a child using such means to silence him, or those who merely do not wish to be "bothered" by a child's needs, the results are the same: when an adult in charge gives a child the message that his feelings are not valid, there are going to be repercussions to it at some point in time. While injuring a child in any way is unconscionable, the longterm effects of invalidating a child's feelings is much worse. In such instances, when a child quickly learns that expressing emotions will result in "something bad" from the adult in charge, he decides that he does not know what he is "supposed to" feel-- and the implications of that add up to disaster.

It has long been reported that many, if not most, individuals who end up with substance dependencies, criminal behavior, abusiveness toward spouses and children, and other such negative lifestyles, were usually "abused children." While statistics do show that this is a fact, they generally leave out the very relevant point of what making a child unable to feel does to a child, and what the "child" eventually does with the problem.

One individual brought this fact to light in a bone-chilling comment: "Violence is the normal response to pain." Beginning with the logical view that it is only a "normal" response if one is an animal, and what exactly separates and differentiates human beings from other "animals," is this problem which is rarely addressed-- the ability to communicate effectively comes from the ability to think and feel effectively, and if that ability is "shut down" in a child, all he has left to rely on are his "animal" instincts.

To clarify: if you kick a puppy, it will cower; if you continue to kick it, it will become mean-- it will seek to lash out and harm you or someone else. Some segments of American society are filled with the human counterparts to "kicked puppies;" but the factor in question is not how many American adults were "kicked" (abused) as youngsters, the factor in question is what the result of invalidating their normal emotions has been.

The fact that so many have turned to substance use, or, even harder for many to understand, addictive behaviors which produce "psychic numbing," is a clear indicator-- when a child is taught that his normal responsive emotions are "wrong," he becomes uncomfortable enough with his emotions that he will go to any length to keep them at bay. Normal emotions then appear as if they were just under the surface where he cannot actually reach and define them, but annoy him to the point of trying to "get rid" of them.

What are the eventual results of keeping a person "out of touch" with his or her normal emotions? The range of results is frightening. Some turn into "bullies" and abusers; some, who cannot grasp their own emotions become "control freaks" in the same manner that was done to them, by claiming that their children, partners, friends, etc., "do not know how they really feel," "do not know what they really want," and are "wrong" in anything they assert; and others attempt the modern trend of "recovery."

As for the latter, it should be quite an eye-opener to see how much focus there is on "recovery groups" and "recovery programs" of this nature; for example, a local group which is billed as "Healing Through Feeling." Whatever it is that a specific individual is allegedly "healing" from, the concept that middle-aged adults must "learn to get in touch with" their feelings is almost like a different language to those of us who have never had such a problem.

How middle-aged adults could possibly not know "how to" feel, "what to" feel, or what is "appropriate" to each circumstance, is mindboggling. This is one issue that the Narcotics Anonymous texts did not take into consideration-- while they proport "recovery" in terms of 'the full range of normal human emotions,' they missed the fact that many if not most "addicts" had had that taken away from them "long before the first time they used (drugs/alcohol)." So an individual gets the drugs and/or alcohol out of his life, with no preparation whatsoever regarding how to deal with 'normal human emotions' or even what they are; and he then has few choices-- he can either turn to groups, programs, therapists, etc., to try to help him "learn" how to feel and what to feel, or he can "act out" with inappropriate behavior toward himself and toward others.