So I’m flipping through some of the digital files I have of instructional child training materials from ye olde cult days of my youth and y’all, I forgot how blatant it was.
Five to ten licks is amateur hour, wtf who only got five to ten licks???
These excerpts are from Michael Pearl’s book “To Train Up A Child” (if you know, you know), but I found strong parallels in other sources that were used in my community and family. One sermon I was reading the transcript of was exhorting parents to push past the “overwhelming” feelings of shame or worry or sadness that they might experience during child training sessions, because “it gets easier with each consecutive child” and because “false and worldly compassions must be trained out of (the parents)”
Anyway the most interesting parallel I found in multiple sources was that parents were encouraged to be violent but also to keep their violence calm, controlled, measured, routine, etc. No angry lashing out, no yelling, no screaming, and make sure the kid is a non-resisting (or even participating) victim as often as possible.
I guess I think it’s interesting because that shit doesn’t just show up when you start researching how to recover from child abuse. The ACE score asks if adults in your childhood often yelled at each other, it doesn’t ask if he was calm while he told you that he had to beat Satan far far away from you with a dowel rod to the backs of your thighs and then you were expected to say thank you and hug him while trying to keep the blood from staining through your skirt. Everything was calm, and routine, and stable in my childhood! It was just also really fucking horrible and inescapable, idk.
The presence of routine and methodical violence made the abuse harder to identify later.
