“Breaking the Will” is Disassociation from Self

Breaking a child’s will is a core parenting practice prescribed by the Christian Brainwashing Industrial Complex (CBIC). In order to successfully brainwash a child it is important to separate them from their own wants and needs by making them feel that their own desires and needs are bad, dirty, or shameful. Thus, disassociation from self becomes the default “normal” state in order to maintain compliance¹.

The CBIC relentlessly advocates the “breaking the will” of infants and toddlers through spanking, yelling, or withholding care/love/attention. Even loving, well meaning parents can traumatize their children if they follow this bad advice.

A child’s sense of safety comes from their primary caregivers. When those same caregivers create fear in a child by threatening hell, hitting, yelling, or withdrawing – a child’s mind cannot cope. In order to protect itself from the terror of an unescapable situation in which it is completely powerless, the mind steps in to protect by fragmenting the information. The information that is too painful to be integrated is pushed out of conscious awareness behind a dissociative veil.

“This paradoxical experience (the parent is at the same time the source of, and the solution to, the child’s fear) is capable of disorganizing the child’s mental processes and represents a type of traumatic experiences constituting an inescapable threatening experience in the face of which the child is powerless (Schore, 2009; Liotti, 2017)².”

This mental state can also be conceptualized as splitting into a true self (unacceptable to caregivers and therefore hidden) and a false self (mask worn that is acceptable to caregivers).

Disassociation is the unconscious way our minds have learned to protect us and keep us functioning in traumatic situations. But this deep disassociation also keeps us from ourselves. Discovering our true selves only begins once we begin to establish a sense of safety, one that includes the knowledge that are very existence does not demand eternal torment.

Footnotes:

1. https://www.nicabm.com/working-with-structural-dissociation/ ↩︎
2. “Harsh, punitive, or withdrawn caregiving jeopardizes children’s ability to appropriately manage challenge, increasing internalizing and externalizing symptoms (Feldman et al., 2009; Harden, Buhler, & Parra, 2016; Margolin & Gordis, 2004).²“” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10314734/#R68 ↩︎