How Wounded People Seek Out further Punishment
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Why do we choose partners who punish us? This film dissects how childhood wounds lead to unhealthy adult relationships. Break the cycle, understand attachment trauma, and seek true connection. #Trauma #Relationships #AttachmentTheory #Healing #SelfSabotage #Psychology
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CREDITS
Produced in collaboration with:
Aaron Sampson
https://www.motionmaverick.com/
Title animation produced in collaboration with
Graeme Probert
www.gpmotion.co.uk
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Video Summary & Chapters
No chapters for this video generated yet.
Video Transcript
There's a bitter paradox that awaits many of us who have suffered from harsh, unloving
childhoods. We have an above-average chance of ending up in – and blindly putting up
with – harsh, unloving adult relationships. Our original unfulfilling bonds to our caregivers,
far from warning us away from future turmoil, appears to compel us to recreate its features
in grown-up life. The true toll of bad childhoods isn't circumscribed to their actual duration,
it's exacted via a lifelong service.
urge for their sad echoes. We suffer from an instinctive pull towards dimly familiar
forms of mistreatment and struggle. We unconsciously gravitate towards situations that mirror our
early wounds. Like everyone else, we want love to take us home. It's just that for
us, home was a place of grief and persecution. It's easy enough to see why children put
up with poor treatment. They are born radically powerless. They can't run away, they are
utterly at the mercy of others, they can't even think especially straight. What they
must do, above all else, is adapt. Which in practice means learning to put up with poor
treatment. They have to develop an advanced skill at not noticing quite how awful things
are – an expertise at being unfazed by cruelty and neglect. Children in deprived circumstances
tend to be geniuses at looking away, disassociating and making light of things. Of course, it
might not be perfect that their father screams at them constantly, but there are some interesting
shows on television and there's a really fascinating bit of the garden to explore in
the morning. You can climb up the big tree and imagine it's a little house. And of
Of course, ideally their mother wouldn't be so mocking and disloyal.
But that's just the way things are.
Neither more or less sad than the fact it's often raining.
And there's a lot of homework to do.
In any case, the bad treatment almost certainly has to do with something that they, the child, have done wrong.
Badly treated children tend to take a compulsively generous view of those who injure them.
Obviously, they aren't nasty on purpose.
That would make no sense.
Clearly, their ostensible brutality has sound explanations.
It must be because they, the child, is a child.
in the wrong. That's why they're being neglected. That's why they've been declared
fools. That's why they're being bullied. It's a great deal easier to believe that
the parent is tough, yet fundamentally right, rather than gratuitously callous and unjustifiably
hostile. In other words, what a bad childhood trains us to do, above all else, is to indulge
meanness. The muscle that normally functions to repel attacks has had to be starved and
has atrophied. In order to survive, we had to lose the ability to work out what was good
and bad for us, lest we discover that we spent 18 years in the company of fiends.
What this means for our futures is that we will be extremely poor at discerning when
the partners we let into our lives cross the border into selfishness and malevolence. We
continue under a narcoleptic command not to notice that we are being robbed and deceived,
will be as blind to the blows now as we were then. For a long time, it simply won't occur
to us to wonder why we have ended up paying for everything for the partner, or why they
are unreliable in their promises, or constantly prioritise their friends over us, or are angrily
defensive whenever we raise a complaint. We will simply, as we had to early on, fall into
line and invent elaborate explanations for their behaviour. They're good, but they're
tired. They're adorable, but under pressure at work. They're fierce, but compensating
for their childhood traumas, for which we have a lot of sympathy. Anything other than
the more straightforward conclusion, we've fallen in with unconcerned egoists. We shouldn't
compound our disloyalty towards ourselves by feeling on top of it.
everything else, ashamed for our tolerance. It isn't weakness, it's a survival strategy
from childhood that served a very sensible purpose then but is liable to be ruining our
Video Summary & Chapters
No chapters for this video generated yet.
Video Transcript
There's a bitter paradox that awaits many of us who have suffered from harsh, unloving
childhoods. We have an above-average chance of ending up in – and blindly putting up
with – harsh, unloving adult relationships. Our original unfulfilling bonds to our caregivers,
far from warning us away from future turmoil, appears to compel us to recreate its features
in grown-up life. The true toll of bad childhoods isn't circumscribed to their actual duration,
it's exacted via a lifelong service.
urge for their sad echoes. We suffer from an instinctive pull towards dimly familiar
forms of mistreatment and struggle. We unconsciously gravitate towards situations that mirror our
early wounds. Like everyone else, we want love to take us home. It's just that for
us, home was a place of grief and persecution. It's easy enough to see why children put
up with poor treatment. They are born radically powerless. They can't run away, they are
utterly at the mercy of others, they can't even think especially straight. What they
must do, above all else, is adapt. Which in practice means learning to put up with poor
treatment. They have to develop an advanced skill at not noticing quite how awful things
are – an expertise at being unfazed by cruelty and neglect. Children in deprived circumstances
tend to be geniuses at looking away, disassociating and making light of things. Of course, it
might not be perfect that their father screams at them constantly, but there are some interesting
shows on television and there's a really fascinating bit of the garden to explore in
the morning. You can climb up the big tree and imagine it's a little house. And of
Of course, ideally their mother wouldn't be so mocking and disloyal.
But that's just the way things are.
Neither more or less sad than the fact it's often raining.
And there's a lot of homework to do.
In any case, the bad treatment almost certainly has to do with something that they, the child, have done wrong.
Badly treated children tend to take a compulsively generous view of those who injure them.
Obviously, they aren't nasty on purpose.
That would make no sense.
Clearly, their ostensible brutality has sound explanations.
It must be because they, the child, is a child.
in the wrong. That's why they're being neglected. That's why they've been declared
fools. That's why they're being bullied. It's a great deal easier to believe that
the parent is tough, yet fundamentally right, rather than gratuitously callous and unjustifiably
hostile. In other words, what a bad childhood trains us to do, above all else, is to indulge
meanness. The muscle that normally functions to repel attacks has had to be starved and
has atrophied. In order to survive, we had to lose the ability to work out what was good
and bad for us, lest we discover that we spent 18 years in the company of fiends.
What this means for our futures is that we will be extremely poor at discerning when
the partners we let into our lives cross the border into selfishness and malevolence. We
continue under a narcoleptic command not to notice that we are being robbed and deceived,
will be as blind to the blows now as we were then. For a long time, it simply won't occur
to us to wonder why we have ended up paying for everything for the partner, or why they
are unreliable in their promises, or constantly prioritise their friends over us, or are angrily
defensive whenever we raise a complaint. We will simply, as we had to early on, fall into
line and invent elaborate explanations for their behaviour. They're good, but they're
tired. They're adorable, but under pressure at work. They're fierce, but compensating
for their childhood traumas, for which we have a lot of sympathy. Anything other than
the more straightforward conclusion, we've fallen in with unconcerned egoists. We shouldn't
compound our disloyalty towards ourselves by feeling on top of it.
everything else, ashamed for our tolerance. It isn't weakness, it's a survival strategy
from childhood that served a very sensible purpose then but is liable to be ruining our
