The Child Who Never Had a Chance

…Grew up, and saved her self.

In 2012, my step-mother said to me, “You saved yourself.” That was the first kind, supportive thing I had ever heard her say about me. I guess verbal affirmation was not her love language. So you can imagine that it meant a lot to me, because even as adults, children always want their parents to be proud of them.

Why did she say that to me? She knew the abuse I had incurred. She had watched it happen. Much of the time, she resented me, because my father resented her children, and they were constantly at war with each other. The children always get caught in the middle.

My first abuse memory is when I was three-years-old. I think I was three. My memory is blurry, so my vision was not yet set. I was sleeping in a crib. I remember my father busting down the door. He yelled that I locked the door. I don’t remember. Maybe I did. My mother follows him. He snatches me out of the crib. I feel confused. I feel scared, because he’s yelling at me. He’s telling my mother to hold me down. I am face down in her lap. He’s beating me with his leather belt. He won’t stop. My mother is crying. She is begging him to stop. End of Memory.

The first time I contemplated my mortality was when I was five-years- old. What child thinks about their own death when they are five? At age 6, I remember standing at the bottom of the driveway crying and trying to get the courage to run away. My sisters were constantly bullying me. My mother was very good at making me feel ashamed. I didn’t feel loved. I didn’t have the courage to leave. Where is a six-year-old going to go?

At age 8, I remember writing suicidal poetry. I had diaries back then. My sadistic aunt opened my diary and read its contents. She and my mother shamed me for saying that I wanted to die. After that, I would destroy my diaries after I wrote in them for fear that a family member would find them and use them against me.

I could continue my trauma list, but you get the point.

The real point is that as long as you have childhood traumatic events haunting the corners of your mind, as long as you have these emotional thorns buried in your mind, then you will not be able to have healthy relationships. Because, whether you admit it or not, you will harbor feelings of self-doubt and low self-worth, and you will have a fractured self-identity. You will constantly be emotionally triggered by the events that surround you. You will harm yourself, whether that is by doing drugs, by attempting suicide, by letting yourself be beaten, by letting yourself be raped, or something else not yet named. Or you will harm others. There are abused people who are victims. There are abused people who become abusers. And there are abused people who play both roles. Until you decide to stop it, the abuse is a vicious cycle, and you will attract abusive people. You have to learn how to break the cycle. The creation of trauma events is a process. Abuse is a process. If abusive behaviors are created, then healthy behaviors can be substituted. Anything created, can be re-created.

In future blogs and podcasts, I will be discussing how you can re-create yourself using the same techniques that I used to re-create myself.

Check out my new podcast here!