Child abuse is most often linked to a cycle, but when considering a cycle where do we break into the loop to start our investigation?

I want to make the point that what comes around goes around – but it all starts somewhere so can also end somewhere.

Before someone figured out that rats carried the plague nobody could attack the terrible problem at its roots. I believe that we have to, as parents and adults, recognize the true reality of our own childhood traumas so that we can understand how they have impacted us. Child abuse does not just hurt little people. When those little people grow up they carry those wounds with them for the rest of their lives. So far, I don’t see that we understand exactly how these consequences are all linked together. Advances in developmental neuroscience tell us that child abuse, especially to infants and the very young during brain developmental changes, in fact gives the survivor a brain built for a malevolent rather than a benevolent world.

Until we educate ourselves about this fact we are in effect killing the horses and sparing the rats that are the cause of the plague among us in the first place. A malevolently-formed brain is designed for a different world. If we don’t understand this we are screaming our loudest across a chasm trying to change those who hurt the little ones without realizing they truly aren’t able to hear what we are saying to them. Their brains hear and understand information differently. It’s our job to face this truth so that we can find a way to reach the abusers who were themselves abused. Otherwise – and obviously – the cycle is not only continuing but is growing in force and magnitude.

Most of the time we are ‘preaching to the choir’ about child abuse.  Those 50% at the top of the heirarchy who came from safe and secure childhoods are screaming to those down below about what to do and what not to do.  Those at the very bottom can never hear those words.  It’s time we empower those at the bottom, those who had truly horrific childhoods from birth, to know their own reality and do their own screaming from the bottom up.  Will those at the top hear us?