Bully Parenting Hurts: Cycles of Abuse

Bully Parenting Hurts: Cycles of Abuse

This article relates to Mother Mary Comes to Me

When Mary Roy was growing up in Delhi, India, she endured extensive trauma. Her violent father would yank her by her hair to hold her in place, then brutally whip her with his riding crop. Recentering his rage onto her mother, he would beat her until she bled, and in the heart of winter he would throw both wife and daughter out of the house. To escape her father, Mary proposed to the first man who wanted to marry her; he was an alcoholic she quickly left. As an adult, Mary, now a single mother, turned her rage against men.

Her daughter, novelist Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things), notes in her memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me that when her brother was a teenager, her mother raged at him, "You're ugly and stupid. If I were you, I'd kill myself."

Roy reflects, "It was remarkable that Mrs. Roy felt able to say those terrible things to her son in this, the land of son-worshippers. The land in which sons must be given more than daughters…The land of infanticide and female feticide, in which millions of daughters are done away with. Sometimes my mother behaved as though all of this was my brother's fault…he was the only man she could punish for the sins of the world."

Starting with her father. Continuing with her husband. Endured by her daughter Arundhati.

When a baby is born and begins to develop a relationship with their parents, both their brain and their parents' brains are flooded with oxytocin. Referred to as the "love hormone," oxytocin is responsible for the bonding and attachment new parents feel. As Dr. Jen Fraser notes, "It has the job of making parents fall head over heels for their baby to give them the strength to have broken sleep…and to shoulder a constant state of serious responsibility."

And yet this flood of parental love for a tiny newborn can be diminished if the parents' past trauma is triggered by the stressful caretaking of an infant, in which sleep is sporadic, and energy reserves are depleted. It can also be misguided by the parents' experiences, as repeated episodes of childhood abuse often sculpt a false belief. That bullying is what made them stronger and tougher and successful, even as they admit they were marginalized and damaged because of it.

"Research is extensive and clear," Dr. Fraser warns, "that bullying from adult to child does not give them an advantage, doesn't help them, doesn't make them tough or have grit, doesn't lead to greatness, doesn't support them in healthy social relationships."

Arundhati Roy managed her mother's bullying with silence. She anticipated her mother would exhaust herself with her vitriol, but often Mary Roy would have a round one, a round two, and a round three. Her bullying took the form of public humiliation and consistent verbal attacks.

The four general parenting types are authoritarian (strict rules without negotiation), authoritative (nurturing with discipline), permissive (warm without expectations), and neglectful (detached with few expectations). The authoritarian parenting style can involve bullying and lead to children becoming bullies themselves in adolescence, because abuse is cyclical.

"Having a parent who was maltreated as a child has been identified as the single most important risk factor for child maltreatment," according to Ruth Gilbert and Rebecca Lacey of University College London, who also admit more research is needed.

Leonie Segal of the University of South Australia says, "Abused children often grow into adults with poor impulse control, a heightened sense of shame, an over-alertness to threat, easily triggered, with extreme levels of distress that can result in early substance use and mental illness, compounding harms."

Many abuse victims experience self-loathing. Arundhati Roy knew she had to escape her mother to maintain her sanity. She and her mother agreed on a false truth, that their separation was mutually agreed upon when it wasn't. While research shows that abuse doesn't support positive outcomes, Roy was able to channel her trauma into her art, which allowed her the freedom to flourish.

Filed under Medicine, Science and Tech

This article relates to Mother Mary Comes to Me. It first ran in the September 24, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.