Hi bubbles
What your counsellor says about being the products of bad upbringing make absolute sense to me. However, to say he was never abusive is wrong. His bad upbringing doesn’t make it our fault that he saw a ***** in our armour and took advantage of us any more than our bad upbringing encouraged him to manipulate us and use us for his gains. My counsellor said that we are given ‘scripts’ in childhood about how to live, how to handle situations etc. The script is given to us by our parents, who had theirs given to them by their parents and so on. We don’t know any better.
Retrospectively, the more I analyse my family the more I can see how my behaviour mirrors that of my mother towards my father. Counselling is a way of breaking that cycle and re-writing the script for ourselves and future generations, something that is extremely important for me with regards to my daughter.
I’m sure that if perps could recognise that they had a ‘deficiency’ then counselling of this kind could help them just as much, but they have to recognise it and seek help. I’m not sure if the bad upbringing/ script that causes someone to be abusive would ever allow for that realisation.
To quote my respected counsellor “There are no monsters, just those who are given bad scripts. It’s up to us to rewrite our own.”
