"He used to just put a wrench a stick and a belt on the table... just say choose"
Yesterday while re-watching Good Will Hunting for the second time, this particular conversation struck me more than anything. As they say, when you watch a movie for the first time, you just watch it but when you re-watch it, you feel it. That’s what happened to me as well and it brought so many questions to my mind which didn’t occur before.
This movie, no doubt throws light upon so many things which are less discussed. It tells us the importance of communication which is many a time overlooked. Lack of communication often results in bad things, and child abuse is indeed one of them. In this particular conversation, we don't see a patient and a therapist sharing their problems to figure a way out of it, rather we see two people sharing their vulnerabilities to ease the burden of the emotional baggage of their traumas that they've been carrying around since their childhood.
In this same conversation, Will asks Sean if he had experienced anything like that and Sean says that he used to provoke his alcoholic father when he returned home late at night so that he wouldn't go after Sean's mother and brother and they would be safe. This conversation depicts the grim reality of child abuse, and childhood traumas, and how severely it perturbs young minds leaving no room for their innocence and happiness. They lose their childhood for good, and they never get it back. Quite surprisingly, some of the parents perpetuate this torment that results in mental traumas, which also continue in their adolescence. These parents believe that beating up their child in the name of discipline is a moral act as if their parenthood entitles them to that, which they also consider a "privilege".
What I find more depressing is the fact that how corporal punishments are taken as very normal and common in Indian families. This is possible only because there's no explicit provision mentioned in the law that prohibits parents from beating/abusing their children, unlike in western countries. Even if there are laws available to prevent child abuse, it nowhere explicitly mentions anything about "Parents beating up their child".
Various loopholes and lack of rigid implementation of the laws allow these parents to torture their kids, take pride in it, and later on justify their actions as "discipline". Beating the child for not securing good grades, beating the child for returning home late from school, beating the child for spending more time with friends as if the only way to rectify the mistakes is " beating up". They often fail to perceive how their children will grow up having attachment and abandonment issues, which could be worse at times.
Putting an end to this issue overnight is improbable and rather impractical. So, the first stepstone has to be making the parents aware of the importance of communication with their children and how it can solve issues in a gentle, polite, and most importantly humane way. If making the kid disciplined is a matter of concern then it obviously has to be in a moral way otherwise the child will grow up thinking that it’s okay to beat people whenever the slightest inconvenience happens. They’ve to be made aware that it’s not the right thing to imitate the toxicity that their parents normalize in the garb of discipline and strictness. They’ve to be made understood that cutting ties off with a toxic parent is okay if it brings them comfort and closure. Our duties and responsibilities towards our parents end when they disrespect us and our boundaries.
Hence, to quote Sean from Good will hunting “It’s not your fault”. In this scene, Will wasn't apologizing to Sean. Will was reverting to his childhood, to the moments in Will’s life when he was being abused by his foster father. It was those feelings of inferiority and helplessness that Will kept bottled up inside all of his young, adult life until they periodically erupted and he raged against himself, which Sean had to bring Will back to, in order for Will to finally release those feelings for good.
By getting Will to express his feelings about the abuse he had experienced in his youth, Sean was helping Will’s inner child finally spring free from the shackles of self-guilt and self-hatred, which Will had retained inside all those years.
We may not get a therapist like Sean in our life to do that for us but the least we can do is release the resentment gradually. This article is for each and everyone who has been through these traumas but never got a chance to be vocal about it. Those who had to bottle up their emotions for societal and peer pressure. Those who had to deal with abusive, emotionally unavailable parents, who always gaslighted their kids to get their work done.
It wasn't your fault. It was their fault for not validating your feelings, for taking away all those precious days from you, for pushing you toward the edge when you were meant to be protected. For trivializing you and your mental health. You didn't have to go through all of these alone. You didn't deserve this. None of us did.