My Psych Profile #3 - The Larkin Ascending

They fuck you up, some poets do. They may not mean to, but they do.

[I hope you don’t mind me posting this today (I mean bombarding you with posts - I won’t make a habit of it - promise), but it goes with yesterday’s poetry and I wanted to get it out the way whilst it still felt relevant; and it’s a lot more pleasant than the previous three versions I had raving around my head before I actually sat down to write it]

“They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.’ – Philip Larkin

Just for the record, the next two lines in the first stanza of that poem go ‘They fill you with the faults they had, then add some extra, just for you.’

You can read the whole thing here. It’s called ‘This be the verse’, and it’s got that well-known quote in it.

So, then, following on from the previous instalment of this psych profile thing, which was all about my rotten bio-parents (compared to my real parents, who were my maternal grandparents), this is where I take serious issue with Larkin.

Well, not necessarily with him per se, seeing as he was probably a victim himself of gaslighting, or coercive control at the hands of his own parents, and didn’t realise when he wrote that, that this is what he was doing himself. You see that’s the great irony here. This poem is about how intergenerational trauma is continued by being passed down from one generation to the next.

But it’s bullshit, isn’t it?

I tell you what I’ll do, I’ll rephrase that first line and then you will understand what I mean.

‘They abuse you, your parents do – they may not mean to, but they do.’

Get it? How the fuck can you ‘not mean to’ abuse your own child? How can you not be aware of what you are doing? If you replace ‘fuck you up’ with ‘abuse’ then the gaslighting becomes a little more obvious.

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an evil poet sitting on a fluffy white cloud

See, my bio-father used to quote that line to me somewhat often. In other words, he was saying he was perfectly aware of the possibility of fucking up your child, and yet he didn’t change that attitude!

I’ll give you some examples. The first time I was returned ‘home’ from that abusive Institution, they recognised the fact that the child who came back was not the same personality.

What would you do, as a parent, in that situation? Option one, send your child back there to continue the abuse, or option two, correct your ‘mistake’. That’s to say, you apologise profusely. You give your child a huge hug and comforts and you love that child and you say ‘you didn’t do anything wrong’ and ‘we are so sorry’ and ‘we made a terrible mistake’ and ‘we honestly didn’t know what it was like’.

That kind of thing, you know. The kind of thing a normal fucking human being would do!

It’s not fucking rocket science, you know, being at least a half-decent parent. It just takes common fucking sense and empathy. Like ‘how would I feel if I were my child’ and ‘what would make my child happy’ and ‘I want my child to be safe’. How difficult is that, really?

Especially given the release of a hormone called oxytocin which is released in both mother and child immediately after the hurty bit of the birthing process. Some people call it the ‘love hormone’. It fires off a whole load of neurotransmitters in the brain which triggers all that emotional high and the maternal behaviour pattern involved in caring for that child. Even if that child is an ugly Winston fucking Churchill lookalike. Real motherhood is blind, in that sense. Many of you who are mothers will know what I’m talking about here.

Same is true of you fathers, by the way. Your brain can create oxytocin too of course because you would have had it when you yourself were born. This also triggers a cascade of mirror neurons – i.e. reflecting that love. Those mirror neurons then get reinforced and become fixed neural pathways. That’s how younglings learn. Not just humans, all animals.

Same thing happens for social animals when learning via your peer group. Behaviours and opinions – neural bundles – get reinforced.

Neuroscience and psychology should absolutely be on the national curriculum, eh?

Mind you the all-powerful parasite ruling class would never allow that would they? People might develop an immunity to mass brainwashing.

All love springs from a mother’s love. That’s why you should be worshipping the Goddess, by the way, not some jumped up little fucking demon pretending to be a god. Fuck that shit. That’s cultic, that is.

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As you know if you’ve read the previous psych profile entry, you’ll remember my bio-mother rejected me at birth. This may have been a result of it clearly being rather more painful than a normal birth (she also has slim hips, I should’ve added), seeing as they had to drag me out with forceps (about which she remained in denial ever since). So maybe there was no oxytocin release.

Fortunately for me, I got my addiction to oxytocin from my real parents soon after. So my brain ‘learned’ love during that crucial first year. It’s why I’m a fundamentally good and loving and moral person. Imagine a child who never experiences that, or has some serious trauma inflicted on them within those crucial first few weeks of life outside the womb. Doesn’t take a genius to know what will happen to their mirror neurons and thus their programmed pathology.

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the skies went on forever, purple and red and yellow and little fluffy clouds

Here's another example of how that line ‘may not mean to’ is the real fucked-upness here.

This is a bit dark, I warn you, so be prepared (don’t worry – there’s no graphic details though).

I am about seventeen I think when this happens. I think it must’ve been around that time because I’d been expelled from school by then, I’m sure.

Anyway, I come back home from somewhere to find my bio-father and my childhood sex abuser in the low-lighted living room drinking – of all fucking things – Special Brew.

For my non-English readers I should tell you that Special Brew is a brand of extremely high-strength lager. It’s like 9.5% or something, it tastes atrocious, and it’s the kind of stuff tramps and alcoholics might drink.

I actually drank that shit myself a fair few times at school because it was a cheap way of getting drunk. Of course I would inevitably vomit fairly quickly, but once you’ve done that you’re kind of ok to continue drinking.

My usual preference for getting myself drunk was a half-bottle of Smirnoff. I remember one time I downed it straight in about five minutes. Inevitably, no more than an hour later I was unconscious on my bed. Having – I should say – sensibly vomited into a trash bucket beforehand so as not to choke myself to death. Of course, this being a boarding school, I was discovered by one of the staff who promptly sniffed the contents of the trash can. I remember being asked if I’d been drinking and barely mouthing the word ‘no’ before slipping away into blissful nothingness. Vodka doesn’t really have a smell of course, so I was believed. They concluded I had food poisoning, so they promptly dispatched me up to the sanatorium, where I spent a very pleasant two days. I was looked after by a lovely nurse, who fed me and everything, I got to stay in bed the whole time and watch TV. And not have to do any work. And they never knew!

So that was a massive win, that one.

Unlike most people at school, who drank at weekends because it was the naughty and ‘cool’ thing to do, I would also drink during the week and I drank because I didn’t want to be there anymore and quite frankly I would’ve been very happy to drink and not wake up again.

Unfortunately I sort of did wake up, and when I woke up properly for the first time it scared the shit out of me and so we engineered a pathway out of there. That’s how I got myself expelled, that is to say. I’ll leave that episode for another time, though.

Back to the sinister incident. I’m sure that you yourself are feeling just a little uncomfortable and emotionally recoiled by the idea of my bio-father and my abuser in my house, drinking together. I don’t even need to elaborate there, do I?

What I will say though, even though my memory of what happened next isn’t really there, is that at this time there was still a kind of block, or amnesia wall, preventing me from looking at my abuser and thinking of the simple word ‘abuser’. This is a part of the grooming or mind control process you understand. It’s the same with what they call coercive control. There is a rational part of you that knows stuff like ‘this is wrong’, but then the triggered, programmed bit pops up as soon the realisation-thought comes to you and immediately pulls that thought back down again, leaving you really quite confused, because you don’t really know what just happened. It’s like you know you had an important thought but it’s not there anymore and you can’t remember. It’s a very disconcerting experience, as I’m sure you can appreciate.

This is also one of the aspects of being abused that haunts you in later life, when words like ‘shame’ and ‘humiliation’ come along. Because at the time of the abuse you are not allowed to say ‘this is wrong’. So – at least in my case – I formed a fawning part/alter to deal with it. That’s the part that says ‘there’s nothing wrong with any of this’. If there’s nothing wrong, after all, then it’s not traumatic. In fact it’s what they say it is, ‘love’, isn’t it? See how sick that is? But of course there are other parts who know it’s not right. The fawn might not feel shame, but the other parts do.

See how fucked up that is? So yeah, we can indeed change the phrase ‘fuck you up, your parents do’ to ‘abuse you, your parents do’. And as soon as we do this, we realise the big gaslighting lie in the next line ‘they may not mean to’.

Like, yeah, my bio-father seriously ‘didn’t mean to’ have a nice cosy evening together with my abuser. Sure. I mean that kind of shit happens like all the fucking time, doesn’t it? Oh yes it fucking does.

That’s just ‘a mistake’ that is. Absolutely. Didn’t mean to. Sorry about that, must do better next time.

Fuck that.

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Decent parents – that’s to say normal fucking human beings – do not do such things. Yeah, you might think you make ‘mistakes’ as parents, but in doing so you do not fuck your children up. Maybe you can identify these ‘mistakes’ and because you are a good person you exaggerate their importance – and thus your own guilt – in your mind.

Like maybe you were a little angry once and said a few harsh words to your child. Well, human beings are emotionally robust enough to not develop some stupid pathology about it for the rest of their lives. Like ‘yeah, my parents grounded me that one time’. Shrugs. So fucking what.

When placed against the experiences I’ve described above, hopefully you are feeling a little better about yourselves now. Remember that – your children are far more robust than you think. All they need to know is that, whatever little mistakes you might make, their parents genuinely love them. So what you end up with is just petty little family disagreements. Humans can cope with them so long as the perception of love is there, and the knowledge that it’s real love and the perception is the truth, not a lie.

Humans forgive, in other words.

But some things can’t be forgiven.

Real coercive control comes from when your abusers try and tell you they ‘love you’ or ‘it’s for your own good’ – essentially presenting themselves as ‘benevolent’ and ‘caring’ in their positions of authority and control – but their actions betray them as liars. Except you are too young to know that really. Deep down you do know it, because all human beings are born with an innate sense of fairness, but you are not allowed to know it. And so it gets suppressed into your unconscious (or, in my case, perhaps, split into an alter, who grows up to be the rebellious angry one who wants nothing more than to drive a fucking stake through their evil fucking hearts – sorry, they don’t have hearts do they? I forgot. My bad. Fuck you, Mother! I’m going to learn how to play guitar and run away and be in a band! Fuck you!).

That sense of fairness, by the way – let’s also call it morality – is indeed innate, because it’s based on emotional perception of pain. That’s to say you don’t like feeling pain, whether physical or emotional or whatever. Pain is a bad thing. It must be avoided and rejected, because it’s a sign of impending damage. If you feel pain, that’s not fair, is it?

Now combine this with those mirror neurons which are the basis of empathy in a social animal. Just as you don’t like feeling pain in yourself, you don’t like seeing it in other people. Especially those you care about, your friends and children and your animal-companions and so on. Maybe even the planet herself, eh? Your home, I mean. When you get to the stage of brain development where you have a language and a good picture of your social environment then you can articulate this innate understanding into easily comprehensible sentences.

Maybe when you’re a little older and learn to write, you may even write it down.

And at the top of the page you write ‘code of laws’. Or ‘morality’.

Except at some point, if you are philosophically minded, you might experience the sudden realisation of how incongruous and dissonant it is to actually write all that down as a ‘code of laws’ despite it being innate. And you laugh!

Then you might start calling yourself Dionysus and have a total breakdown.

You yourself, after all, don’t need to be told the difference between right and wrong, do you? You don’t need to be told which behaviours are unacceptable, because they cause pain, do you? You know what’s fair and what isn’t.

You don’t need to be told what to do.

And neither do children!

You don’t need ‘commandments’.

Commandments are gaslighting. They are infantilising. They are subjugating you to a need to be told by authority how to behave. But of course it loves you! Of course ‘god’ loves you! And you are supposed to love back.

For ‘love’, read ‘Obey’.

Only someone who is morally defective needs to be told what they can and cannot do.

So fuck all that gaslighting and coercive control. Fuck that cult shit. Fuck all those bad parents who should never be allowed to be parents in the first fucking place.

Those sorts don’t ‘make mistakes’ and ‘fuck you up without really meaning to, darling’.

Oh no. I will never forgive them. For they know precisely what they do.

And they don’t stop it.

A mistake is only a mistake, until it is corrected, as the Ancient Greek statesman Solon once intoned.

But abuse is never corrected.

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Still, at least I am no longer coercively controlled. Because that block isn’t there anymore.

Fuck you, abusers. I won! Fuck you!

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The Goddess Isis sitting on a fluffy white cloud

I’ll probably tell a bit more about how I won at a later date. In the meantime, how about an offbeat snap poll? If you are happy that we won, click the like button. If you wanted the bad abusers and parents to win, don’t click it.