"kick the cat" Syndrome
Have you ever suffered from ‘Kick the Cat Syndrome’?
I’d love to say I’ve never done it but of course I have: “I’m only human” after all. That’s one of the key refrains of “Kick The Cat Syndrome.” I am sad to say that at one stage in my life both the refrain and the syndrome were quite familiar to me.
Someone I know describes this syndrome more revealingly than I do. Like many of us, after an abusive childhood, she fell into other abusive relationships. She writes, “I’ve had so much pent up anger in me, and recently I was the one who lashed out at someone else…mainly because he wasn’t being honest with me…but still, I don’t.” I don’t want to end up being a ‘molester’!”
There are, of course, different ways to attack ‘El Gato’. You can do it both verbally and physically. Neither is particularly desirable, although a physical expression of anger seems less justifiable.
‘The cat’ can be the abusive partner or someone else who crosses your path when you are already primed and ready to explode. (To the cat lovers, please allow me to apologize and specify that we are absolutely No talking about a real cat.)
What it comes down to, as my reader rightly observed, is having already had an abused belly (and I use the term belly deliberately, no wonder abused women often suffer from Irritable Bowel Syndrome) and then the abuser adds another outrage on top of that
That most recent outrage ignites what in the UK we used to call ‘the blue touch paper’ and we exploded.
Sometimes it feels safer to blow up on someone who didn’t cause the mountain of pain in the first place, because they’re less likely to respond in a way that’s dangerous to you.
You’ve reached the stage where, one way or another, you were destined to explode or implode: either you take your feelings out on someone else, or you feel like you’ll be torn into a million little pieces by your own unspoken pain and anger.
Does it do any good? No. It may make you feel better for a very short time. Like comfort food, the feeling of satisfaction ends with the action itself. A sense of isolation from shame quickly follows in its wake.
The truth is that it is not a pleasant thing to do and it does not fit with your image, and more specifically with your deep and precise beliefs, about yourself. It happens because it’s a pattern you’ve learned from the abusers in your life, just as I learned it from the abusers in mine.
What you see – or, more correctly, interpret – from their behavior is that this type of behavior is sanctioned. It must be, isn’t it, or wouldn’t they? And don’t they always justify it one way or another? Some old trusted favorites include:
I’ve had a hard day
you take me to it
If you hadn’t done X, Y or Z…
· How do you expect me….?
You don’t know what I have to put up with
You get the picture?
Actually, his behavior has been sanctioned, repeatedly, by you, because in the end, when that kind of emotional hurricane hits, you try to batten down the hatches and wait it out. It has also been sanctioned by many other people, less central to the abuser’s life, who for one reason or another, elude or overlook it. So you approve of this behavior and you also acknowledge its power.
When we fall into the ‘Kick the Cat Syndrome’ it is fueled by the belief that such behavior is somehow vindicated by past injuries. It may also feel preferable to the feeling of helplessness you feel as a victim.
Also, there’s a kind of logic to it: he kicked me, so I have the right to kick the next person. It’s all too easy to become one of an endless chain of Cat Kickers.
So how do you kick the syndrome?
First, you begin to free yourself from the abuser’s pattern in your own head. You identify the behavior when the abuser is perpetrating it and remind yourself that it is childish, unacceptable, harmful, and you have a choice. You don’t have to behave that way.
Second, you begin to honor your own sense of pain. Anyone who has been in an abusive relationship has been severely deprived of the love, respect, and consideration that they need and deserve. That deserves to be recognized.
Conventional wisdom focuses on that loss: it reminds us that what we wanted was not to have in that relationship and those months or years.
Conventional wisdom does not tell us – because you don’t know – that our subconscious mind and our feelings live in the now, the moment. (Although consciously, too many of us spend too much time focused on the past or the future.)
So here’s the thing: you can start to heal old wounds in the present by deliberately caring for that wounded person in a loving way. There is the hurt, damaged, and needy you, but there is also the caring, loving, resourceful, and supportive you that you share with friends, children, and other loved ones.
You can begin to allow that mature, loving, resourceful self to metaphorically put a comforting arm around the shoulders of the self in need. You can begin to offer those in need words of comfort that will filter through the pain and help them heal from it.
This is work that I do a lot with abused women that is very powerful. If you don’t have someone to figure it out with you, you can take the time, maybe just 15 minutes at a time, to do it yourself.
Third, you can work with someone who can understand you and help you work through the pain with respect. Just talking about it with someone who is supportive and non-judgmental can strip these old patterns of much of their payload.
Cats, and dogs, that have been mistreated by their owners, can heal from trauma with love and time. You also can. What’s more, you can use the miracle of language and your own enduring resources to heal faster and more completely than they do.
© 2006 Annie Kaszina