At some point in our childhood, we all felt like abused children. Someone said NO, or took away our privileges for an offence we had committed against the rules. We thought the sky was falling on our heads and that there was no justice in the world. We didn’t know how good we had it. For many children abuse is a very real thing. It has an impact that sounds through the years and never leaves. There is more than one kind of abuse, and which is worse, is a matter of debate.
Three A.M. on a Sunday, and I wake to a strange noise. As I gain some focus, I realize, it’s my 46 year old husband lying beside me. He is rhythmically whimpering. I listen a little longer and realize it sounds like someone being repeatedly struck, and then I know. Somewhere in my husband’s head, he is 8 or 9 years old again, and being beaten with a golf club by his own father. I reach out carefully to hold him, and he jumps at my touch. By day my husband can be an obnoxious big mouth all mean talk and sour grapes. Then sometimes, he’s gentle as can be, playing with our little girl and being silly. It’s almost as though he expects the absolute worst of everybody and wants them all to know he knows it coming and he couldn’t care less. There’s a lot of anger in him still, and there probably always will be. He fights like he doesn’t care if he gets killed, so he always wins. If I didn’t know his history, which I didn’t our first 5 years together, I would probably have left him to be miserable all alone. But then, I know that our childhood has a lasting effect on who we are.
When I was growing up I wasn’t beaten, although I was punished physically in the ways that children were in the 70’s. However, my mother had the worst habit of being critical that I have ever encountered. When I grew up , I took her with me, in my head. I once completed some testing to see what sort of career would suit me best. One thing I scored very high on was self-abasement. I had taken over where my mother left off, and I have systematically ruined my own life at every turn.
One of the biggies for me was covert criticism of my weight. I wasn’t usually called fat, it was just implied. For example, taking me to a big ladies clothing store when I wore a size 8 and insisting to the sales woman that there HAD to be something there that would fit me. In my early adulthood, I just let myself go, climbing well over 200 pounds and deciding that was the way I was. By my mid 20’s I had changed my tune. I went weight loss insane. I am now a weight loss addict. I have wrecked my stomach and my ability to digest food,. I weigh in at a whopping 102 pounds and all I see in the mirror is a fat woman, with bad hair and no talent.
In my late teens I married a man who repeatedly beat the crap out me. I stayed with him until I couldn’t anymore because I had left in an ambulance and the courts wouldn’t let him near me. I wonder sometimes, how long I would have stayed believing I deserved it,
Mom has changed over the years. She compliments, and encourages now, but the little girl inside me can’t hear her.
Sexual abuse of children is a subject I can’t write about without shuddering. Someone I knew, up close and personal, was subject to sexual abuse by both her father and her brother. She didn’t cope very well. She was diagnosed with a dissociative identity disorder, sometimes referred to as multiple personalities. She tries to maintain something of a normal life, and has three children. She is in and out of hospital on a pretty regular basis. Some of her ‘personalities’ are suicidal and if her medication is off, they surface. It’s disgusting to me that anyone could need sex so badly that they could ever resort to harming a child. Personally, I am of the ‘render them without equipment’ attitude, regardless of the offenders gender.
Child abuse is stealing. It steals the child’s here and now, and it steals their future.
Resources for adult survivors of child abuse can be found at the ASCA site.
If you need information on rescuing yourself, your children or someone else you care about from an abusive spouse there is a good information source called I’m Still Standing which helps you set yourself up from a legal and financial standpoint and teaches you how to build a support network. It also shows you how to protect yourself from further abuse of many different types, even if the court can’t help you.
