"Kick the cat" Syndrome

Have you ever suffered from ‘Kick The Cat syndrome’?

I’d love to say that I never did but of course I have: “I am only human” after all. That’s one of the key refrains of “Kick The Cat Syndrome.” It saddens me to say that at one point in my life both the chorus and the syndrome were familiar to me.

Someone I know describes this syndrome more revealingly than I do. Like many of us, after an abusive childhood, he fell into other abusive relationships. She writes: “I’ve had so much pent-up anger in me, and recently it was me who lashed out angrily at another person … mainly because he wasn’t being honest with me … but still, no! I don’t want to end up being an ‘abuser! ‘! “

Of course, there are different ways to lash out at ‘The Cat’. You can do it both verbally and physically. Neither is particularly desirable, although a physical expression of anger seems less justifiable.

‘El Gato’ can be the abusive partner or someone else who crosses your path when you are ready and ready to explode. (For cat lovers, let me apologize and specify that we are absolutely do not talking about a real cat.)

What it is all about, as my reader rightly observed, is having already had a belly full of abuse (and I use the term belly deliberately, it is no wonder that battered women often suffer from irritable bowel syndrome) and then the abuser adds another outrage on top of it.

That latest outrage lights up what in the UK we used to call “blue touch paper” and we explode.

Sometimes it feels safer to blow up against someone who didn’t cause the mountain of pain in the first place, because they are less likely to respond in a way that is dangerous to you.

He has reached a stage where he was one way or another destined to explode or implode: either vent his feelings on someone else or feel like his own unspoken pain and fury will shatter him into a million little pieces.

Does it help? No. It may just make you feel better for a very short time. Like comfort food, the feeling of satisfaction ends with the action itself. An isolating feeling of 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 ingrained and precise beliefs, about yourself. It happens because it is a pattern that you have learned from the abusers in your life, just as I learned it from the abusers in mine.

What you see, or, more correctly, interpret, of 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 of the old trusted favorites include:

I had a hard day

You take me to that

If you hadn’t done X, Y or Z …

· How do you expect …?

You don’t know what I have to put up with

You get the picture?

In reality, their behavior has been repeatedly sanctioned by you, because in the end when that kind of emotional hurricane happens, you try to close the hatches and wait for it to pass. It has also been sanctioned by many other people, less important to the life of the abuser, who for one reason or another, avoid or overlook it. So you approve of this behavior and you also acknowledge its power.

When we fall into ‘Kick The Cat Syndrome’ it is fueled by the belief that such behavior is somehow justified by the pain of the past. It may also be preferable to the feeling of helplessness that you feel as a victim.

Also, there is a kind of logic: he kicked me, so I have the right to kick the next person. It is very easy to become one of an endless chain of Cat Kickers.

So how do you get rid of the syndrome?

First, you begin to free yourself from the pattern of the abuser in your own head. He identifies the behavior when the abuser perpetrates it and reminds himself that it is childish, unacceptable, harmful, and that he has 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 in that relationship and in those months or years.

Conventional wisdom does not tell us: because he doesn’t know – That our subconscious and our feelings live in the now, the moment. (Although, consciously, many of us spend too much time focused on the past or the future.)

So here’s the thing: you can begin to heal old hurts in the present by deliberately parenting that hurts yourself in a loving way. There is the hurt, damaged, needy you, but there is also the caring, loving, resourceful, and understanding you that you share with friends, children, and other loved ones.

You can begin to allow that mature, loving, resourceful you, metaphorically, to put a comforting arm around the shoulders of the needy you. You can begin to offer that needy words of comfort that will seep into the pain and help heal it.

This is a job that I do a lot with battered women that is very powerful. In the absence of someone working it out with you, you can take some 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 overcome pain with respect. Just by talking to someone who will support you and not judge you, you can strip these old bosses of much of their explosive charge.

Cats, and dogs, who have been abused by their owners, can heal from trauma, if given love and time. You also can. In addition, you can use the miracle of language and your own enduring resources to heal faster and more completely than they can.

© 2006 Annie Kaszina