From Metroidpolitan:
Research suggests my experience isn’t unusual. UC Davis sociologists Robert Faris and Diane Femlee have studied bullying extensively; in a CNN interview, Faris summarized their findings:
"Kids are caught up in patterns of cruelty and aggression that have to do with jockeying for status ... It’s really not the kids that are psychologically troubled, who are on the margins or the fringes of the school’s social life. It’s the kids right in the middle, at the heart of things … often, typically highly, well-liked popular kids who are engaging in these behaviors. When kids increase in their status, on average, they tend to have a higher risk of victimization as well as a higher risk of becoming aggressive."
Abuse isn't restricted to one history or narrative. Abuse compounds abuse. That cycle passes from hand to hand and person to person.
Such truisms can be deceptive, but that doesn't make them invalid. For one person it's their childhood trauma, for another, its when their brother was killed by Palestinians. For another it was growing up poor and having a meth addicted mother. Whether you turn around and take it out on someone else or whether it changes you in more subtle ways, you can't help but react to your history with every action you take, and inflict that history on others, maybe even without knowing it. Given how endemic cycles of abuse are, it seems unlikely we can heal all wounds, so long as you have to remain in this world to heal from the world. How do you get the goose out of the bottle?
Such truisms can be deceptive, but that doesn't make them invalid. For one person it's their childhood trauma, for another, its when their brother was killed by Palestinians. For another it was growing up poor and having a meth addicted mother. Whether you turn around and take it out on someone else or whether it changes you in more subtle ways, you can't help but react to your history with every action you take, and inflict that history on others, maybe even without knowing it. Given how endemic cycles of abuse are, it seems unlikely we can heal all wounds, so long as you have to remain in this world to heal from the world. How do you get the goose out of the bottle?
More than any of these simple categories, more than even what we think we know about ourselves, our lives are conditioned by the unspoken and the unconscious. Yet there must be some commonality to our experience, for us to be able to even begin to understand one another, so maybe it isn't all shadow and silence.
What can we say? In a statistical sense, certain populations are more systemically fucked than others. No doubt. So understanding may have to begin with these generalities. But it can't remain there, or we're just stereotyping one another in a new way. Do we not want to know other people's stories, because they might contradict what we already think we know about the world? Or is the complexity of difference simply too much for us to comprehend?
