many parents, who end up - while sometimes only  half realising it - bullying their own children. 

The bullying may take many forms. Why do parents  bully their children? In short, in order to try to  

feel better about themselves. Because they suffer  intensely in the very same area that they are  

bullying their child in. If we, as children, want  to know what our parents were afraid of or haunted  

by, we only need to ask: in what areas did they  bully me? What did they make me feel scared or  

inadequate about? Someone made them feel awful and  they surmise - by twisted logic - that they will  

feel better through the process of making their  own child feel very bad indeed; they aren’t doing  

it personally, the child is collateral damage to  a misguided project of healing and attenuation of  

symptoms. It doesn’t make any sense of course, but  it may actually work for the parent, for a time. 

Let’s imagine a parent who harbours a terrible  fear of being stupid; somewhere in their own past,  

they were belittled and made to feel  hugely inadequate. Now a child comes  

along, their own child, full of the normal  hesitations and weaknesses of early infancy.  

Without really realising what they are up to,  the parent grows inflamed and incensed by this  

child’s apparent stupidity - and starts to mock  and attack in another what they fear and hate in  

themselves. It makes them feel a bit better.  The child becomes a repository of all that  

they fail to tolerate in themselves. They, the  child, are the dumb one, so they, the parent,  

don’t have to be; they, the child, are the stupid  and ugly one, so they, the parent, don’t have to  

be. The child is a cry baby, a weakling and  a pathetic twig. And therefore the parent is  

liberated to live more easily within itself. The  bad is contained and localised; it can’t be in  

them, if it is all in little him or her. ‘Don’t  be such a moron or a ninny. Stop being such a  

wimp,’ the parent screams at the child, in the  hope that no idiocy or weakness remains in them. 

It can take bullied children a very long time  to realise they have been bullied. They don’t,  

after all, grow up thinking that someone else has  actually made them feel stupid or made them feel  

ugly or made them feel soiled  - let alone their own parent,  

whom they depend on and admire and long to be  loved by. They simply think they are stupid,  

ugly and soiled. There is no call  for an explanation or a cause. 

Yet if we are those now grown up bullied  children, we don’t need to wonder too much  

more about what might have happened to us.  We simply need to take stock of how we feel  

about ourselves and guess that the terrible  judgements and sensations that we have about  

ourselves did not arise spontaneously. They are  the outcome of events - physical behaviours as  

well as words and atmospheres that we were  subjected to. The feelings we harbour of  

ourselves are legacies of real occurrences  in the world. Someone, who isn’t necessarily  

owning up to it, made us feel a certain way  - and that is why we are now in such pain. 

Typically, those who have been bullied don’t  look backwards. Their illnesses point them  

relentlessly to the present and the future. The  bullied anticipate terrible things happening to  

them that echo events that once happened to them  but they don’t remember these in any way. They are  

cause-less paranoiacs, self-haters and worriers.  Catastrophe is never far away. A person feels they  

are ugly because two decades ago, a mother made  them feel as much. A person feels they have done  

something very wrong because, even further back,  someone did something very wrong to them. The fear  

contains the imprint of unconscious history. We overcome our bullying when we learn  

to discriminate: between what actually  belongs to us and what was placed in us,  

between who we are and what we’ve been told  we are, between how our caregivers like to  

present themselves and what they have actually  done. Our triggers and apprehensions lie along  

the faultlines of our early traumas; they  can guide us back to what we were suffered  

through when we are ready to explore. It’s sad enough that children are bullied by their  

parents; it’s even sadder that a legacy of this is  that children can’t realise what happened to them.  

And instead typically fall victim to the same  tricks played out by substitute figures in their  

later lives: partners, colleagues, even the media. We’re on our way to overcoming bullying when we  

can say, at last, I am not ugly, I was made to  feel unacceptable. I haven’t done anything wrong,  

something wrong was done to me. And in general:  I am not awful - something awful happened to me.