Why did my parents hurt me?

Perhaps it's because their parents hurt them when they were growing up. And the reason their parents hurt them was probably because their parents hurt them. You see, when human beings are born, we don't know how to act toward other people. We only know the way our mothers and fathers treat us. We learn to act the same way. If our parents hurt us a lot, we learn that hurting children a lot is just the way human beings treat children. It doesn't mean the children are bad, or that their parents don't love them; it only means the parents think that's what they're supposed to do.

So, because your parents were hurt a lot as children, perhaps they thought they were supposed to hurt you. Or, perhaps your parents did know that they weren't supposed to hurt you. After all, they probably didn't like being hurt when they were little, either.

But people learn how to treat other people from their parents, and your parents learned from their parents how human beings are supposed to behave. I guess you could say they were mis-taught or misled or mis-educated.

But it really doesn't matter much whether they thought they were supposed to hurt you, or whether they thought that's just how people treat each other, or whether they knew better and were just too angry inside at their own parents to be able control themselves when something went wrong.

Because your parents did hurt you, you know what it feels like inside when you're really angry. You want to strike out and hurt whoever upset you, don't you? That's probably exactly how your parents feel, too. No matter how much you love someone, you know from your own behaviors and feelings that sometimes you just can't seem to help hurting folks who make you angry.

You see, when your parents were as young as you are now, there weren't any government agencies to step in and help their parents stop hurting them. So your poor parents learned to use violence instead of reason when they were upset.

Today, there are government agencies who step in and take the child away from his or her parents before the child can be badly damaged by his parents. I'll bet that really surprised your Mom and Dad, because it probably never occurred to them to get professional help with their tempers and with their violent behaviors.

But now, while you are living with me, your Mom and Dad are getting professional help, and they are trying to learn new ways to treat children. You are here to learn how people are really supposed to treat each other. This means that when you go home, your parents will know how children are supposed be treated and will have learned how to control themselves a little better, and it means that when grow up, you won't hurt your own kids the way you and your parents - and probably their parents, too - were hurt. It's a lot harder to be really, really angry when you understand the reasons people do the things they do.